Taken with a vintage early 1970s or late 60s Pentax Super-Multi-Coated Macro Takumar 50mm f/4 lens, around 1/3rd life size, on Sony A7R mounted on a 42mm thread adaptor tube. Manual exposure at f/11-16 to secure adequate depth of field with a natural effect for large scale views, though sharpness is slightly better around f/8. Elinchrom ELB400 flash with one softbox to the right, and one Mini Optical spot to the left, which creates the sunshine-like effect and attractive cast shadows. Both are about 1m away from the subject, full power on the flash, ISO 100 on the camera. The power split is 2/3rds to the softbox, 1/3rd to the optical spot.

The dried flowers are almost 20 years old, and were originally produced for the cover of a Paterson Products catalogue, and photographed digitally using a Leaf Lumina scanning camera in a much larger basketful, with the colours less faded. To use them for this, they had to be vacuumed clean of two decades of dust, fibres, webs and debris but the picture still need some retouching to remove a few strands of this, invisible to the eye when working.

The original size file is very large at 24MB when compressed to Level 12 JPEG. No noise reduction has been applied, and only standard sharpening defaults, convering from raw using Adobe Camera Raw and the Camera Standard profile.