Exploding Flowers of the Kansas Prairie

This quadruple-exposure was created in-camera using a swing/tilt flat-field 80mm lens on a full-frame dslr. Handheld, using on-camera flash.

 

 

Excerpts from the short story Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne:
"Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young girl, arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and compressed, as it were, and girdled tensely in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone. Yet Giovanni's fancy must have grown morbid while he looked down into the garden; for the impression which the fair stranger made upon him was as if here were another flower, the human sister of the vegetable ones, as beautiful as they, more beautiful than the richest of them, but still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask..."
"...That this lovely woman", continued Baglione, with emphasis, "had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature was imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich perfume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have been poison - her embrace death. Is this not a marvelous tale?"