Set up the 350D with bellows to get a close look at a strawberry flower.
Lighting from a bright LED lamp.
Took 12 photos varying the focus a little between each.
One of the shots showing how shallow the depth of field was.
Let CombineZP align and then Stack the photos
A better lens, better lighting and operating the camera with a cable release would make for a crisper result but this certainly shows the possibilities of the program.
Later.
It was later that I noticed some aberration at the bottom of the stacked photo and the next try I carried out with a different lens taking 16 shots had distortions on all edges. Possibly a result of the shots differing in subject size as the focus is altered. The centre part of the picture is fine and it is possibly better to make sure the subject doesn't fill the frame.
This is a crop of the main part of my final session for now.
The lens used was an old Super Takumar 55mm f1.2 manually set to f4 as wider apertures gave poor results. The 350D was set to ISO 400 and 1/200sec
John look at my post I get a really odd alignment. You have framed yours so not easy to tell. Mine is way out. a forty five degree shift.Next rainy day I'll try banging some exposure blends through. It's OK though, better than without software.
ReplyDeleteJohn the aberration is focussing too close, as you realised............More to the macro job than I thought.
ReplyDeleteAdrin - quicky as meal is ready. This from the help file:
ReplyDeleteNotice CombineZ adds a border around each frame that is a reflection of what is just over the edge of the original picture. ( For efficiency, all frames dimensions must be devisible by certain small integers, this border insures this, it also reduces artifacts at the edges of the true frame.)
Your bent bit of biro is an probably extra which can be cropped as needed. The same applies to the extra bit I found at the bottom of my trials. Seems like we need to keep a clear area round the original shots.
Well it's all a mystery to me but I can see you boys are enjoying playing with your toys again and the results look pretty impressive to me :)
ReplyDeleteAn interesting experiment John. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteHello Jan. You are right right. Second childhood, new toys ;>)
ReplyDeleteHello Roy. As you have probably gathered I love experimenting. There have been many times I have been disappointed with a shot which has poor depth of focus and this looks to be one way to overcome that with some subjects.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting John. I already has a set of close-up lenses for my Nikon and bought a step-down ring so I could use the most powerful of them on my Panasonic Lumix FZ28. I got a lot of vignetting but the bit in the centre was just about of (see some of my close-up lichen pictures from earlier this year). It's amazing what we learn by following other people's experiments. I discovered some wonderful fungi pictures on Flickr recently, taken by a nice chap in New Zealand. I'm about to put his advice into practice.
ReplyDeleteHello Emma. Like you I learn a lot from visiting others and seeing how they do things.
ReplyDeleteThe closer you get to something the bigger the problem with depth of field. The other problem I found was camera movement. Even on a sturdy tripod using the button on the camera to take a photo can cause minute movement which is enough to give slight blur. For all my micro and macro I now use a cable release and that certainly made an improvement. More than I expected.
I must try to find the chap you mentioned and have a look.
Had a look at your lichen photos and they look great to me.