This is macro photo of single stamen inside a flower
field scabious, or Knautia Arvensis with
grains of pollen. This plant is common around Moscow and in the parks of the city (we call these flowers "короставник"). Stamens of this flower produce so small pollen grains that they are beyond capabilities of my current optics: on this picture, we cannot see exact shape of grains. But pink color of pollen is real, it is not cast by flower petals, which you see at background: when i transferred this pollen at black glass, grains still looks pink on camera screen.
Prints available at
Artist website, RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at
Shutterstock.com, 500px.com.
Pollen grains of Field Scabious - full scaleI've found a page with images of
Knautia Arvensis pollen grains, obtained by scanning electron microscope, so you can see their exact shape.
For this image, i've used my trusty "snowflake" macro setup (i described it in article about
snowflake macro photography). Daylight comes from left side, and reflected from right side with aluminium foil.
I used focus stacking and
averaging techniques: 12 groups of photos with different focus was taken, each group contained 10 identical shots for averaging. After assembling object, i've prepared background (averaged all 120 source RAW photos - for better smoothness of color gradients with no visible traces of noise) and combined object and background with manually painted mask.
Here is next photo -
stamen of vegetable marrow with big pollen grains:
