terse fragments

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jpclicks said:
Is a focus stack like burst mode? I haven’t heard of it before.
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For a focus stack, you take a series of photos, all from the same spot but each at a different focus distance (enough to cover your subject from nearest point to farthest). For that part, I use CameraPixels, which has a "focus bracket" mode that lets you set the near and far limits and the number of shots and then snaps off the series changing the focus automatically.

Once I have the photos, I pull them into Affinity Photo using its Focus Merge option. It waves its wand and, if you're lucky, combines the sharpest parts of each photo to create a single image in which your subject is sharp from front to back. So I use it in situations where the normal depth of focus doesn't cover the subject, most frequently when the nearest part of the subject is very close.

Affinity Photo generally does a good job of aligning the multiple images, but in this case, I was outdoors. There was barely a breeze at all, but it was enough to move parts of the plum blossoms in between shots, so some parts of the stack couldn't be aligned properly.

Here's an example, shooting top down on a carved giraffe that's about 12 inches tall:

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Here's an outdoor example with a long focus range. It's not obvious that it's a focus stack, but ordinarily if you focused on the broken bottle so that it was sharp, the distant background would be more obviously out of focus. If you click on this one and view it large, you can see that the light colored plants in the background were moving slightly in the breeze.

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terse said:
Here's an outdoor example with a long focus range. It's not obvious that it's a focus stack, but ordinarily if you focused on the broken bottle so that it was sharp, the distant background would be more obviously out of focus. If you click on this one and view it large, you can see that the light colored plants in the background were moving slightly in the breeze.

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I see. Thanks for the explanation. That giraffe is so sharply focused!
 
terse said:
Yes, in the right circumstances, it can make for a dramatic shot. In other circumstances, probably not worth the effort. dscheff has done a number of these, too.
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Thanks Ted! The Zebra is wonderful. Camerapixels is my fav too :thumbs: Focus stacking produces some fantastic results when everything comes together. I'm truly amazed at the work posted on #heliconfocus on Instagram.
 
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An experiment: Developing a previous raw image in Raw Power instead of my usual Lightroom Mobile to see if I want to change apps. It came out pretty well, and the app has all the controls I look for (including Perspective, which you only get in the subscription version of Lightroom). Can't say at the moment if the results are better than LRM, but RP makes better use of screen space for me.
 
terse said:
View attachment 177290

An experiment: Developing a previous raw image in Raw Power instead of my usual Lightroom Mobile to see if I want to change apps. It came out pretty well, and the app has all the controls I look for (including Perspective, which you only get in the subscription version of Lightroom). Can't say at the moment if the results are better than LRM, but RP makes better use of screen space for me.
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What a great capture!
 
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