Lepanthes cincinnata

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naoki

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I purchased this as Lepanthes sp. aff. manabina in spring 2017 from Equaflor-a. After going through all of >1000 illustrations/photos of IOSPE (wow, that was a lot of work!), I narrowed it down to a couple candidates. After checking the illustrations, I think this is Lepanthes cincinnata (please let me know if I'm wrong). There are a couple photos of this species in Orchids Forum (some are confused with L. manabina as pointed out by others). Dale Borders' plant looks quite different, though (here). The bottom part of the lip of mine has hairs (like the illustration here). But the bottom part of the lip of the Dale's plant shows a different shape, and the petals are hairy. Epidendra has a photo, but the resolution is too low to see the bottom of the lip.

According to IOSPE, this species is from Valle de Cauca, Colombia at 2200m. I should check with Gilberto if it is from Colombia. If my ID is right, it probably prefers a lower temp than L. manabina. It was ok during the summer when the night temp could be up to 65F, but now it is much cooler and getting around 55F. To be honest, I didn't notice that there were a fair number of flowers on this plant since it was put in a corner with fairly dim light. But I'm guessing that they started to flower when it became cooler.

I think that the flower is moderately big (for Lepanthes) and I didn't have to use extension tubes to get enough magnification.


Lepanthes cincinnata on Flickr


Lepanthes cincinnata on Flickr

I've never dissected Lepanthes flowers, and their structures seems confusing. The two wings are petals. Inside of the petals, are the wedge shaped parts with deeper wine red color correspond to the lip? I'm guessing the brighter red dot below the lip is the column, right?


Lepanthes cincinnata on Flickr


Lepanthes cincinnata (ovary & bud) on Flickr

It is interesting that the texture of the leaves are different in fresh leaves. The 5 velvet-textured leaves at the edge of the pot are the old/original leaves. In the middle of the pot, there are about 5-6 smaller leaves, which were produced over this summer. The newer leaves are not so velvet-like, and much lighter in color. They almost look like different species. Some new leaves show the reticulation, too. It could be due to the young age of the leaves, but it is probably due to the environmental differences.

Lepanthes cincinnata (plant) on Flickr

Update: I posted a related blog post here, which hopefully explains the difference between the similar species.
 
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How strange and beautiful, a lovely little flower even if its a bit strange looking love the purple centre. The plant is just as atractive to
 
Nice. Good luck with the ID. Have you contacted Orchidées de Valle?

I contacted Equaflor-a about the location, but I haven't heard back from him. It would be interesting that if this species occurs in Ecuadora, too. After researching about the related species, I'm pretty sure about the ID. I'm not too sure about the ID of Dale's. It seems to be closest to L. manabina, so I'm wondering if it is a green form of L. manabina.
 
I'm curious, though. How much sharpening do you do in Photoshop?

I use Lightroom now (I used to use Aperture). Until recently I thought that I wasn't using any sharpening. So I started to use Nik Collection Sharpner Pro 3 and started to play with its adaptive sharpening about a month ago. One video said around 25-35% setting in Nik is reasonable. So I think that is what I applied (I don't remember, but it was probably around 25-30%). After you pointed this out, I checked the Lightroom now, and realized that the output sharpening was already turned on (It was at "standard"), so it was automatically doing output sharpening! By comparison, LR "standard" seems to be similar to around 22% of Nik. In other words, I was accidentally applying the sharpening twice, which isn't a good thing (especially for an older smaller-sensor camera like mine). So some of these look a bit too much.

Here are the ones which I disabled LR and Nik output sharpening (I don't do any sharpening inside of LR).



This one is highly cropped so it is almost at 1:1 pixel. So I probably applied 30-35% for the image posted earlier.


I also compared the LR sharpening only vs Nik sharpening only. The results are similar, but Nik might be slightly nicer. But I'm not sure if it is worth an extra step.
 
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