Callistemon Seed Pods

Haven't been on here much recently. Firstly the Hospital has been catching up on Consultant outpatient appointments so I had three visits in ten days. They seem satisfied with my progress and the next appointment should be in about four months time. Secondly I've been making amateur radio contacts around the world on the HF bands as conditions seem to be excellent. So good my low power, simple set up managed to make contact with four Japanese radio hams this morning. Not something I can usually manage.

My Callistemon (bottle brush plant) produced another good display of its unusual red flowers. In the Summer they looked like this:



Once the flowers have faded the seed pods can be seen:



I thought this would make an interesting subject for a focus stacked closer view:



That was a stack of 20 photos taken using my home built automated unit. The following photo was taken some time ago:



Once the photos had been transferred to the laptop they were processed with Helicon Focus which used the sharp, in focus, parts of each photo and combined those bits to buid the final macro photo.