This photograph is a 5-image focus-stack of saguaro cactus flowers taken on a tripod with a Nikon D850 camera and a Zeiss f/2 100mm macro lens. The images were exposed a little after 4:30 am in Saguaro National Park in Arizona. All five exposures were f/5.6 @ 1/15, ISO 64. DxO Nik Silver Efex black and white software was used, along with the focus-stacking process in Photoshop.
Saguaro flowers blossom only for a few weeks, mostly in May. They bloom late at night and die by the following afternoon. So, the white flowers are most beautiful very early in the morning, and best photographed long before sunrise.
However, the great difficulty in photographing saguaro flowers is that the flowers only grow at the ends of the arms and tops of the cactus, which were mostly ten to forty feet off the ground.
Therefore, I spent considerable time searching for saguaro cacti with "low-hanging" arms, so I could reach the flowers with a camera and tripod. Out of the thousands of saguaros throughout the park, I found only five "low-hanging" arms that I could reach with my camera and tripod.
Beautiful image, Doug. Worth the effort. Would think about a platinum print of this. So far, it's underrated in my opinion.