My housemate Emily drew my attention to the French lavender in our backyard, pointing out — because I’d never noticed — how each flower head is comprised of many tiny flowers. I took this photo of it last night. I lit the flower by asking my youngest daughter Julia to hold a softbox next to it. I used the flash fall-off rule to get the black background.

When I’m doing flower photography, I have to make some decisions about how much of the flower will be in focus, as well as how soft or detailed I want the photograph to be. This time, I tried to get as much of the flower in focus as possible, and I cranked up the texture in post-processing so you really see the flower in all its close-up intricacy. I like how it turned out. The ISO is really low, and I barely had to crop in at all (the final dimensions are 6752 x 5504). So the image looks super sharp even on my big 27-inch iMac monitor.

Location: Silverton, Oregon

Exposure: 1/500 second, f/11, ISO 250

Focal Length: 105 mm

Gear:

• Camera: Nikon D850

• Lens: Sigma 105mm f2.8 Macro