Passiflora, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

A Passiflora vine twines around the No Parking sign in front of our house here in Berkeley, California. Nicky pointed out one particularly colorful Passion flower, and I snipped the blossom to bring it indoors for photography.

I placed the flower on an illuminated light box and arranged the bud so it was lit by the afternnon sun from behind. I used a white fill card to lighten shadow areas.

This image was created using a Lensbaby Composer with its fisheye attachment. One of the marvelous things about this fisheye-Lensbaby rig is how close it focuses. The lens was right up against the flower.

I used a tripod and shot four exposures without using an aperture disk (the lens was wide open at about f/2), each exposure at ISO 100. The exposures times were 1/5 of a second, 1/13 of a second, 1/25 of a second, and 1/50 of a second.

In Photoshop, I layered the exposures together, starting with the lightest (1/5 of a second) on the bottom. Once I was satisfied with the results, I converted the image to LAB and inverted the Lightness channel to turn the white background to the black you see in the final image.