When is a dried flower better than live spider? When you’re doing a focus stack. When the subject doesn’t move it comes out a lot better.
The first three photos are three of the 136 photos that I stacked together. Notice depth of focus in each only comprises a small fraction of the total image.
Next is the photo stacked image followed by three magnified areas of it.
I think I’m getting the hang of this thing.
136! Yep, pretty hard to keep a live spider still that long.
Fascinating
Without focus stacking, the only way I have of mimicking that result is to shoot something about 5-6 feet away with my 300mm lens at around f10 and then crop in. With the 42 megapixel sensor on my A7RII, there hopefully will be enough pixels in the image.
Next summer I’m going to try to mount the laptop on my tripod and torture my self to get a shot of a dragonfly. I’ll go for ten frames at f\11 and hope the wind gives me the thirty seconds it’ll take to get the stack. Boy, I wish Sony would give us a firmware upgrade to run the sequence in the camera like Olympus and Panasonic. That’s a sweet trick.