A new cactus

Mitchie brought a new cactus home when we went shopping. It’s beautiful, and it belongs to this genus and is related with this species. Which means that when it will bloom it will probably have petals – see it on an old East-German 5 Cent stamp.

Of course I had to take pictures of it:

I took this one right after shopping, using the Olympus E-PL1 and the Panasonic Lumix 14mm lens on my table tripod with an aperture of f/2,8 which means almost fully open. If you look at the detail of the plant you will see that this is a nice and sharp lens. Cropped it to square format and converted it to black & white, simulating an orange filter which brightened up the pot and darkened Zuleikha’s birthday calendar on the door on the left. The light was mixed natural daylight and artificial light from the overhead and background lamps.

This evening I took another one, this time using my E-520 DSLR with the 50mm Macro lens attached. This was lit using my Yongnuo YN-460II through a 24″ square softbox right and above the object at full power. Cropped this into the 7:6 “king’s” format during post. I used the full flash output so that I could stop down the aperture to f/10 – and still you see how shallow the depth of field is when you get closer to your object.

Thanks for viewing.