The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens Orchid Show 2022 has now closed and I am catching my breath. This year the curator asked the six volunteer photographers of the Selby’s Living Collection if we would consent to have our orchid photos printed large scale on aluminum and shown in their museum. We were happy to do so. He also asked us if they built us a temporary photo studio in the museum, if the four current studio photographers would demonstrate to the visitors how we make such detailed closeups of the flowers. We agreed and it was a delightful experience. We tethered our cameras to our computers and tethered them to a monitor they provided so the visitors could see on a large scale what the camera’s viewfinder was imaging. We focus bracketed the images, meaning that we took multiple images of each flower focusing on slightly different planes. Macro lenses have a notoriously shallow depth of field, so we use this technique to get everything in focus. We then stack these photos in a computer app and have the app select the most in-focus parts of each image and merge them into a single image.
This orchid is named Beallara Marfitch ‘Howard’s Dream.’
