Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Experimenting with Macrotechniques

I have been experimenting trying to find out how many images I need to stack to produce front-to-back sharpness in my small insect images with around f5.6. I concluded that only 7 of the series of 15 images I traditionally use contain any elements that are in focus for my very small subjects so I have been stacking just those frames and get much cleaner images without haloing. I have now set the stack number to 10 though will still only stack those frames with something in focus. With single shots, I tried high aperture number eg f18 or F22 (last 4 images) but the quality certainly falls off when fully closed down (last image). Lucky to have some great models for my experiments particularly the Tachina fera mating pair mating comfortably in a folded leaf and the Dung Fly exuding a droplet of water which is reflecting the spurge flowers it is resting on.

1 comment:

Ian said...

An interesting experiment. Thanks for the advice. Why is it camera manufacturers have not added some code to automatically compute this? To my simple mind it should only need you to set the nearest and furthest spots for optimum focus before running quick tests to evaluate the increment required to keep the plane in focus at your chosen aperture. From this it should know the number of shots it will need before taking the actual captures. The focus-shift increments might be extrapolated from predefined tables for popular lenses or empirically calculated at the time.