Looking at the ugly & seeing the beauty!

On the back of our property in a fairly wet area are what looks like from a distance, some forsaken looking weeds.
Looking at them through a macro or zoom lens with a diopter has been giving me some wonderful possibilities!
Canon Rebel 300D
Canon 75-300mm lens with 500D diopter
Extension tube
Canon 420EX flash
Vivitar 283 flash with snoot
Tripod & Wimberly plamp
1/100 sec. @ f4.5
ISO 100

With this shot, I added two white reflectors on each side of the plant to tone down the shadow that was on the lower bud and to bring out the color.
The background was a much darker green than what you see here, so I took the off camera flash and held it low to the ground to lighten it up in hopes of helping the weed stem to stand out more.
It looked okay, but I wanted a little more.
I then took a old Vivitar 283 flash with a smaller slave unit attached, and it would fire when the Canon 420EX went off.
I attached a homemade black "snoot" to the Vivitar flash which created a spotlight behind the weed stem onto the grass area.
So, the Canon flash lightened up the grass and the Vivitar gave the spotlight behind the stem.
It looked great on the monitor but not as bright as I had visioned it, so I gave the spotlight about a 15% punch with omni lighting in PS after masking out the weed.
It gave seperation that I wanted from the background, and the reflectors helped the neon looking colors to standout more within this weed that I wanted to get into the camera.
I used the lens setup to get a out of focus in the stem to in focus on each of the buds, just to be doing something different.

Everone take care, and I think I got today some more "fun stuff" to look at later!

Mike