Tumbleweed flowers

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nanometer
Posts: 324
Joined: Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:14 pm
Location: Tucson, AZ

Tumbleweed flowers

Post by nanometer »

Taken with a Sony 100mm. Stacked with Zerene DMAP from 35 images. Manual stacking with an old Minolta slider. Black velvet background. Lit with Godox flash and the largest Rogue flashbender (about 12-inch square) with the softbox skin installed.

Fully opened, the flowers are about 5mm diameter.

Image

Olympusman
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Tumbleweed flowers

Post by Olympusman »

Those grow up to be the ever-popular Goathead Thorns, which make walking barefoot and bicycling in Arizona risky business.

Mike
Michael Reese Much FRMS EMS Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA

rjlittlefield
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Re: Tumbleweed flowers

Post by rjlittlefield »

Nice image!
Olympusman wrote:Those grow up to be the ever-popular Goathead Thorns, which make walking barefoot and bicycling in Arizona risky business.
Not unless your goathead is a lot different from mine.

These flowers pictured by nanometer look like "Russian thistle", sometimes called tumbleweed, used to be Salsola kali, now Kali something or other, maybe Kali tragus, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_tragus . The flowers vary widely from tan/green to pink, http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... .php?t=669. The plant is upright and sparse, a little prickly but the seeds are harmless.

The things I know as goathead are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribulus_terrestris . That plant is a low growing mat with bright yellow flowers and ferocious thorned seeds.

--Rik

nanometer
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Post by nanometer »

I believe it is a Russian thistle. Interesting that as the flowers age, they turn black with interesting vein characteristics. I'm thinking of doing a mitty 5x of one of the black ones since they seem so unique.

It's amazing what an ugly little bunch of sticks this looks like to the naked eye. The flowers are hardly seen until you look closer. At this stage, there are no leaves on any, so I'll watch next year when the leaves return.

I can't do the black flower now since with a few days of rain stopping, it's a rare opportunity to image some tiny moss (desert floor) which will quickly die.

Smokedaddy
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Post by Smokedaddy »

nanometer wrote:It's amazing what an ugly little bunch of sticks this looks like to the naked eye.
Interesting. I would have never guessed they'd look like this. Nice image.

mtuell
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Post by mtuell »

Nice photo, Steve!

Yeah, Rik - those little yellow flowers tells you it's time to pull that bugger up, before they dry out!

Mike

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