Swamp Milkweed seed pods – the engineer’s approach

Alessandra has recently posted a couple of examples of very artistic images of Swamp milkweed seeds and that reminded me of a walk I made around a small lake in Northern Virginia way back in 2013, and I was amazed to see these large pods on the ground which, when opened, showed a dramatic array of delicately laid out seeds. Being a newcomer to the USA, I had never seen anything like that, and being a photographer, I knew I just had to capture some images of them. Being an engineer by trade, I knew I had to take them home and work on them in my studio – I had no hope of capturing what I had in mind in the field.

I could immediately see that I would have trouble getting things into focus. Of course, I could take the artistic approach and with a wide aperture, just get some key details in focus and the rest will gently fade into a bokeh heaven. But I’m a techy guy and need to see everything! So, I carefully placed the lightly disturbed seeds on a black piece of glass, set up my flash guns and camera on a tripod and started to shoot. My first attempts used a small aperture of F18 on my macro lens, but I was conscious of potential diffraction issues and so I opened up to F14 and focused on the closest point of the pod and got my first image. A slight change in focus deeper into the frame and number two was in the bag. I think I had 10 images in the end to go from front to back and get all the tiny strands in focus. I edited one, copied the develop changes to them all, and then combined in Helicon Focus to get my first view of the entire seed pod.

I decided that the reflection didn’t really help and so this has been removed in Photoshop to set the seed pod against a pure black background. I tried a vertical format version with the reflection more separated from the subject because of the angle of the shot – I think this works better:

Now the world was my oyster – I tried different configurations, extracted the whole stack of seeds from one of the pods to capture this view of the marvelous arrangement of the seeds:

My first printing of this was with the seeds horizontal in the frame – pretty central and surrounded by black. A judge at my local camera club competition criticized it for being too static and suggested that more of a diagonal twist would help – so this is the version that is currently on my wall at home!

This next attempt shows me at my more artistic – an arrangement of individual seeds laid out on some black velvet. Only one exposure was needed for this although I have always struggled to get a pure black background without spots of dust and hairs and so this has had the Photoshop treatment to remove those flaws.

I tend to find a subject, take as many different views as I can think of and then move on. Checking my local files from 2013, this is all that I find. My interest obviously had moved on!

And so that is the story of my seed pod adventures. Without a doubt, both the artistic and the technical approaches have a lot going for them and the choice is in the eye of the beholder. My prints are available on both Fine Art America and also Pictorem. If you are interested in more of my ramblings, I write frequently about the stories behind my images at BackyardImage.com