Pollen factory at work

Snowflake photo: Vegetable marrow pollen grains (800 x 800)

Stamen of vegetable marrow with pollen grains. These grains are slightly smaller than pollen of common hollyhock, and have similar shape (sphere with small spikes), but on these grains we can see also bigger spikes. For comparison, here you'll find an electronic microscopy image of marrow pollen grain:

sciencephoto.com/media/33205/view

Gear: my usual "snowflake" macro setup (i described it in article about snowflake macro photography). Daylight from left side, no diffusor, no reflector. Averaged stack of 64 identical shots.

Here is my first photo in this series: very big pollen grains of Alcea Rosea, separated on black glass:

Stamen of Field Scabious (Knautia Arvensis) with pollen

Field Scabious pollen grains (2048 x 1536)

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.

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Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com, 500px.com.

Pollen grains of Field Scabious - full scale

I'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:

Pollen grains of Alcea rosea (common hollyhock)

Macro photo: pollen grains of Alcea Rosea, or common hollyhock (800 x 600)

This is smallest object i've ever captured (except for tiny snowflakes from this ice dust collection). But for pollen this is very big grains (i've tried several other flower species, but all of them have so tiny grains that my macro setup simply cannot get acceptable picture: magnification is too low). Even on these "big" grains you can easily see my optics limitations, though i've tried my best to squezze maximum details from available source shots.

For two grains in focus i used averaged stacks of 64 identical RAWs (128 shots total). Two grains captured separately and combined in one picture (two unfocused grains taken from first series and averaged along with focused one). Thanks to tiny size of grains, they fit completely in DOF, even with their spherical shape: no focus stacking needed.

Gear: my usual "snowflake" macro setup (i described it in article about snowflake macro photography). Daylight from left side, diffused through white plastic bag. Background: black glass plate.

Here is comparison table of cropped grain in 1:1 scale: single JPEG and RAW, unprocessed and post-processed averaged stack:

Here you'll find another photo: stamen of Field Scabious with pink pollen grains: