Rodney Campbell's Blog

A follow on from my previous post on my macro focus stacking journey…

The Royal Botanic Gardens here in Sydney CBD has a nice sheltered (from the wind) succulent garden. I found a nice specimen (which happened to be very close to the ground (I had to lie on my stomach to shoot) and in full sun) and setup camp. The cacti were very good subjects because they are quite stable plants and the flowers (and hard petals) don’t move even with a light breeze.

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

Here is the “normal” reference shot – f/16, 1/125 sec and ISO 110

NIKON D7000 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/125 sec at f/16, ISO 110

as you can see whilst it is a nice enough shot the DoF doesn’t come close to covering the subject and the background whilst somewhat bokeh’d is distinct enough to be quite distracting

I had two goes at taking some images to stack with slightly different positioning of the camera between them

The first is the result of focus stacking 21 exposures of 1/800 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 100

NIKON D7000 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/800 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100

and this second which I prefer the framing but the stacking wasn’t quite as clean is the result of focus stacking 19 exposures of 1/800 sec at f/5 and ISO 100

Red

NIKON D7000 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/800 sec at f/5, ISO 100

You can see that both stacked versions have much sharper flowers from front to back which pop off the page in an almost 3D way, and also having a smoother creamier background

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