Cowslip (Primula veris)

[Jim Lloyd]

Found this really hard work for some reason, but persevered...

 

Cowslip is becoming more common than it used to be, now seen quite widely in fields and open ground such as roundabouts and motorway verges.

 

Surprisingly little variation in the flower in UV. Just wonder whether flowers than have clear markings in visible tend to have less obvious in UV (and maybe vice-versa?)

 

Also surprised that I didn't find much about this on this site - but maybe not looking properly.

 

These were the best of several - should have had better background I think ...

 

D3200 full spectrum conversion

UG1 2 mm + BG40 2 mm for UV

BG40 only for visible

Photax 35mm f/3.5 old preset version with extension tube

f/16. Sunlight through window indoors

WB and processing in Lightroom

ASA 200 20 seconds for UV / ASA 100 1/30 s for visible

 

I played around with different extension tubes - Ones I recently bought were found to be hopeless due to light leaks. Putting together a couple of different mount adapters to give the right spacing was better. Discovered that it was better to go for a bit less optical magnification and a bit more digital magnification (i.e. cropping in processing). This means distances are a bit greater and therefore depth of fields a little bit more.

 

 

 

[Andrea B.]

Nice work on the Cowslip. It's a pretty little thing, isn't it?

 

Jim, I'm tellin' ya, it's a slippery slope! We'll make an amateur botanist out of you yet!!

 

 

Surprisingly little variation in the flower in UV. Just wonder whether flowers than have clear markings in visible tend to have less obvious in UV (and maybe vice-versa?) Also surprised that I didn't find much about this on this site - but maybe not looking properly.

 

We have an entire section full of floral signatures. Prowl through them and you will find all kinds of examples. :D Most of our members are not interested in the floral shooting which Bjørn and I do, so I don't usually write about it.

 

I don't know that any easy generalizations can be made about Visible versus UV floral signatures? I think that underlying it all would be the type of pollination the plant needs and the visual system of its primary pollinators given that is has living pollinators. (Some flowers are self-pollinated, wind-pollinated or water-pollinated.) As a example, long visible-red tubular flowers are usually not visited by bee pollinators but rather by hummingbird pollinators which can access the nectar in the tube. So these flowers usually have a uniform absorption in UV with no or few UV brighter marks. Sometimes it is the pollen or the reproductive parts of the plant which provide a UV signature rather than the corolla (petals/rays). Flowers which are moth pollinated at night are probably less marked in either visible or UV but tend to be white to reflect the last of the sunset or to be more visible at night. (I have one example of that. Podophyllum peltatum.)

 

 

Bjørn and I have discussed attempting to catalog the UV signatures we have collected, but neither of us ever seems to have the time. I'm not even sure what categories I would construct in an attempt to do that?

[Jim Lloyd]

Your comments made me think of Merleau-Ponty

 

About the dynamic connections in the world

 

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.

 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

[Andrea B.]

And that reminds me that I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the Bull/May poem. ;)

[Jim Lloyd]

RE the Poem - I recommend listening to Basil Bunting reading this

(extract) or getting the book with audio ( here )