Purple Allium flower

That is lovely to look at? Very nice composition with great use of DOF to frame the shot

Out of interest has it been focus stacked or is it a single capture?

That is the question. I agree not only with the question but also the comment.

Sean and Nezih,

Feel free to retract your comments after you have read my 'confession'

The image shown was a single capture with the focal length, aperture and point of focus that would provide render all parts of the flower sharp whilst minimising background detail arrived at empirically. This took quite a while but I was fortunate in that the plant in question was growing in our (strictly speaking my beloved's) garden. Reviewing all the 'test'shots it became clear that the only way I could meet all the desired criteria would be to remove the flower head from it's natural setting; something I was loathe to do. In the end, therefore, the desired outcome was obtained by a combination of optimised capture followed by the use of a mask and gaussian blur (100 pixels) in PSE to give the appearance of a blurred background: naughty, I know, but effective . If you would like to see the before and after images let me know and I will post them on Flickr and e-mail you the links.

Best wishes to you both,

Jon

Thank you for the info. I don't find anything to retract, but respect the effort to achieve a good result.

I say the same great result.