Last month Mark C. shared his first experiments with focus stacking, using dragonflies as his subjects: http://www.markcassino.com/b2evolution/blog6.php/2013/07/06/stack-focusing-dragonflies-in-the-field
So I was in a photo workshop this last week, the instructor kept encouraging us to try focus stacking. I tend to be skeptical of "manipulation" techniques (e.g., HDR) but given Mark's results, I did shoot several series of images with focus stacking in mind. On arriving back home I purchased/downloaded Helicon Focus to process the images and see what I had captured. When I get time I will work on my other insect shots and re-do these two - at first glance they seem to have potential. Below is a link to the first quick attempts. Being a contrarian, I did not restrict myself to macros of insects for the experiments, and I think that the truck cab interior is the best of the bunch. With the beach shots, the variation in wave pattern from shot to shot caused some funny looking patterns when the images were merged, so I did not use all of the images I had in those series. Note that the original RAW images were "dumped" into Helicon as they came out of the camera - no color balancing, sharpening, etc. (There is a Lightroom plug-in that makes this process quite simple.) The images shown here are as they emerged from Helicon - I have not yet done any additional work on color-balance, etc. with the merged images. All of these shot on a tripod, all with natural light. http://photos.stanhalpin.com/p684646393 Comments welcome. stan -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
