I’ve been enjoying photographing seed pods with my Leica Monochrom M11. My new photography neighborhood friend Jaime showed me a local garden, and we photographed flowers and seed pods on location. Later I went back to the garden, and asked the owner if I could cut a few to bring back for studio photography. The garden owner, also named Jaime I think, said “sure.” He also said, “I am not the gardener, I just work here!” What a beautiful garden.

All images were made with my Leica Monochrom M11. The location photos were handheld using the Leica Summilux Asph 50mm/1.4, mostly at f/1.4. There was very little post-production work on these files; mostly they were straight out of the camera. In some ways, the JPEGs generated by the Monochrom camera look Blossfeldtian.

The studio images were photographed with the camera on a tripod, often the same lens, stopped down to f/16 or f/22. I chose the lowest ISO available on the camera (ISO 125).

With the extreme close-ups in the studio, I added a Novoflex bellows on a focusing rail to the tripod, and used my Leica APO-Telyt 135mm/f3.4 to get a little distance from the subject because a real problem in extreme macro photography can getting between your subject and the light, making a nasty shadow.

I think these seed pod images look a bit like they were taken under the ocean, with the seeds representing some kind of weird marine life form!