Flowering House Plant in Macro

Higgmeister

The plant decided it was going to do that spring thing and show it's flowers. I'm not sure what this plant is. I'm assuming the dew drops are very sweet (haven't tasted) to attract bugs. This was shot with available backlight.

1s, f7.1, iso100, camera was on manual.

Nearly forgot to mention that it is a product of 9 stacked shots. I used the 100mm f2.8 Canon lens at nearly 1:1, slight crop. I used an exif extractor to pull the exif data from the first shot and import it back into this photo.

I liked the colors and though I'd share it.
Chris

Lord Vetinari

Great shot- amazing plant.

Technical query- image stacking- do you mean you took several shots with different focus points and stitched them together?

Brian V.

Higgmeister

Hi Brian,
Yes, the shots use a different focus plane, then they are combined, keeping only the parts that are in focus. I use a program called "CombineZ5" which is free ( Combinex5 ). There are a few gotchas to using it, but it's easier than stacking in PS and erasing the OOF sections. The biggest problem I have with this program is if I don't have a good focus point somewhere in the stack, it ghosts that part of the image. Still well worth trying and a little PS fixes things right up. There are also several programs that do basically the same thing. Query Danny (nzmacro) on other programs that do this as he has way more experience in this than I do.

What's cool is in the full size shot you can see details in the dew drops, kinda like what Danny shoots, but not nearly as clear as his.

I do love all the macro shots in this gallery/forum:D.
Thanks for looking and commenting,
Chris

MuskyDude

I like how there's a different scene in each of the dew drops, and your use of available light. Very nice Chris.


AJ

Lord Vetinari

Thanks
Thanks for the info Chris, this is something I've tried to do a few times- I called it "focus slicing", but found it quite hard to do in Photoshop. Will have a look at the progs you mentioned

Here's an example of a bird feeder top with lichens on it I did a while ago- made up of 6 shots.


Brian V.

Lord Vetinari

Thanks for the software again- just tried it on the same image stack (slices) result is a bit better than my earlier attempt. Sorry didn't mean to hijack your thread!

Brian V.

Higgmeister

Hi Brian,
Not a problem Brian, thanks for posting these. It's a good comparison.
The program seemed to create a sharper image, but do you see the ghosting on the left side and a little on the right side along the same focus plane. I'm not sure how to prevent that yet except to take finer increments in focus. My plant shot had ghosting as well, so a little PS work and away it went.
You did a really good job on the manual attempt. I'm too lazy and it looks tedious to do by hand, but I also understand that you can get the best results that way.

Thanks again for posting these,
Chris

Lord Vetinari wrote:

Thanks for the software again- just tried it on the same image stack (slices) result is a bit better than my earlier attempt. Sorry didn't mean to hijack your thread!

Brian V.

Higgmeister

Thanks AJ,

MuskyDude wrote:

I like how there's a different scene in each of the dew drops, and your use of available light. Very nice Chris.


AJ

I was wanting to backlight the plant and I think it worked too. The drops were a bonus and now I know how it's done. I really didn't expect to see detail in each drop, let alone a different scene. It was definitely bonus time.

Thanks for the comments,
Chris