This photograph was created using an in-camera multiple exposure technique. Several exposures of a single thistle stem were layered directly in the camera during shooting and merged into one file — not composited afterward in postproduction.
The result reads less like a plant and more like a structure: a row of dark, thorn-studded columns standing in near-perfect repetition, as if cut from steel or carved into a fence. The thorns themselves — sharp, barbed, slightly irregular from one exposure to the next — break the verticals just enough to keep the eye moving up and down the frame, searching for a pattern that never quite repeats.
The image was shot handheld, without a tripod, in the studio. That absence of mechanical precision matters: a tripod would have aligned the exposures too perfectly, flattening the thorns into a clean, repeating motif. Shot by hand, the small misalignments between exposures give the spikes their bite — each one slightly doubled, slightly displaced, as if caught mid-vibration.
Printed in black and white, the photograph strips the subject down to line, edge, and threat — a thicket reimagined as architecture.
EXIF data of the photograph
- Camera Model: NIKON Z 7
- Lens model: Tamron SP 90mm f/2.8 Macro
- Date taken: 6. 12. 2025
- Exposure time: 1/200s
- F-Number: f/11.0
- ISO speed ratings: 500
- Focal length: 90 mm
- Size of the photo: 8135 px x 5423 px
