Ever Wonder What Pollen Looks Like?

Well, Here you go.

The pictures in this post successively magnify the stamen of a flower and then we zoom into the pollen it's holding. I think they ultimately look like Spanish yellow rice.

As I understand it, pollen comes in all shapes and sizes, these just being one variety which is fairly large. I estimate these particular pollen grains at about .2 mm, or about 150-200 micrometers each.

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Sunflower Surprises

We had some large sunflowers in a vase at home, so I took a look with the macro lens. Here's what I found: A very tiny droplet and a blue crystal of some substance.

The water drop must have been quite small, considering the width of the photo measures an area only about 5mm wide. I didn't know it was there and didn't expect to find it while just shooting the end of  a couple petals.

The photo below contains some parts of the flower that I believe held pollen at one point. Unexpectedly, I found a tiny blue crystal nestled among the structures. I am guessing that it's the dried/crystallized remains of a pesticide or fertilizer that had been sprayed on the field of sunflowers.

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Portals to Other Worlds

Continuing with our plant theme, I've got a few that look like entries to other worlds or other dimensions. In a way, these actually are exactly that, entries to a diminutive dimension inside the blooms.

Above and at bottom are a couple shots of pollen stands greeting our journey inside the flower. Just below here are the complicated folds of a marigold. I've stripped the color from the marigold since we all know what they look like anyway, and removing the color helped emphasize many of the details of the marigold petals.

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Will I Stamen or Will I Go?

Shot these pollen pods on Violet's weird flower thing. The weird flower thing is beautiful in regular size, and just as cool in microscopic.

You can see how much is out of focus in this shot; it is frustrating shooting tiny stuff because the usable depth of field is so shallow. In this photo, I estimate it was around 2 or 3 mm. {CORRECTION: I actually believe now that my usable depth is more like half a millimeter, or in microscopic talk, 500 microns}

I've already stopped down to f32, so there's not much more I can do. While I'd like to have more elements in the photo in focus, that doesn't seem possible without digitally stacking a group of photos.

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