two views of a hibiscus

paddler4

I've been too busy at work for months to do much photography, and I just got back to flowers. I had the idea of grouping whole flower shots with macro shots. I originally thought I might do these in triples, but tonight I gave up after two. Both are focus-stacked: the whole-flower image is composited from 22 shots, and the macro is 28. Both are with Zerene PMax. I usually prefer DMap for flowers, but these are deep enough that I had to use PMax to avoid halos. The blackish stuff on the anthers is not a stacking artifact; it was there in single shots. 5d3, 100mm macro, ambient (halogen) lighting. C&C welcome, as always.

Stumblebum

Stunning is only word that comes to mind! Hard work pays off!

Lord Vetinari

Not mad on #1 but love #2
Brian V.

lifeinfocus

Oh, I like the first one. And after looking more closely, number 2 is great too!

I have been thinking about doing the same as you did with number 1 with a few daylilies. My wife has over 200 varieties in her garden.

Twenty shots for one image - wow. May I ask how do you chose what parts to capture?

paddler4

May I ask how do you chose what parts to capture?

Phil,

thanks.

My notion is: always capture more rather than less. If you take more slices than you want, you can simply ignore or discard the excess. that is one nice thing about digital. If you take too few and you have taken things down, you have to start all over.

In this case, I wanted to keep the petals in focus all the way back in the first one because of the textures. In the second, I was happy to take advantage of the blurred background caused by the large distance to the petals because detail in that case would have been a distraction.

Sometimes, the distances involved don't work out. As an example, here is a shot I took of an other flower on the same plant a few years ago:



With this framing, using enough slices to bring the bottom anthers into focus also put the petals too close to fully in focus. So, I made use of the retouching tool in Zerene. After I had the composite, I painted the background from the top image onto the composite to through the petals out of focus.

Stumblebum

I don't know how to stack so have never asked, but are slices mental? Do you just move the center AF vertically or horizontally and do one pass? Then chop everything except center of each slice and then glue the slices together? Is that even close?

paddler4

I don't know how to stack so have never asked, but are slices mental? Do you just move the center AF vertically or horizontally and do one pass? Then chop everything except center of each slice and then glue the slices together? Is that even close?

You take a series of images, moving the focus point back a tiny bit each time. You then stack the images with software. There are several specialized options, Combine, Zerene, and Helicon, and you can do it in Photoshop as well if you stack up the images as layers. I haven't tried Helicon, but I have tried the other three, and Zerene is by far my favorite. If you google it, you will find some tutorials on the site that explain how it works.

Stumblebum

Thanks! Now I know what Brian is always talking about....Zerene.....I thought it was a hallucinant....;o)