Tag: focus stack

My Time Was Better Spent with the Gorgon

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Today I intended to do some politics.  I read a bunch of articles I checked the various dissidents to see what was ticking them off and I thought about “what this country really needs.”

And I came up with nada.

Basically, the Democrats are convinced they’ve won everything and the country backs them up 100%.  And the GOP establishment think they’ve shut down Trump so they’re pretty smug too.  Well, they’re both mostly wrong but since nothing works better than to give the people what they voted for I can’t think of a thing to say.  Let’s see how bad they screw up the country this coming year.

So instead, I decided to have some fun today.  I did a couple more of those focus stack macrophotography exercises on Nancy Pelosi’s prettier and more personable younger sister, Medusa.

So, this is kind of a bone of contention between Sony and me.  They’ve never provided their cameras with a focus stack capability so I have to use work-arounds.  There’s a Bluetooth remote “commander” that will send a signal to the camera to move the focus back or forth by a small increment and then I can trigger an exposure and then repeat the process by however many exposures needed to get everything in focus piece by piece.  It works but it’s painfully manual.  I also have a tiny software program on my laptop that automates the process but then I have to lug the laptop around in the field.

Other camera makers have added the programming to shoot focus brackets automatically in the camera.  One camera maker, Olympus even has the camera “stack” the bracket into a single composite file automatically.  Now there’s a company that loves its customers.  Sony?  Well miracle of miracles they just added bracketing to the brand new A7R V.  So now the software exists in Sony’s system.  Will they retrofit it into some of the more recent cameras through a firmware upgrade.  Don’t make me laugh!

So here is poor photog, Sony’s laughing stock with his workarounds and his decade plus of Sony tone deaf customer service.  Will he never learn?

Here are some of the bracketed files.

For the first stack I used six files.  This didn’t quite get everything in focus in the first stack.

Next time I took sixteen files and the final product was a lot better.

30JUN2021 – Photography – Focus Stack – Brazilian Jasmine Flower

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I dragged this potted plant inside from its sommer home on Camera Girl’s kitchen porch where it gets the sun it craves.

Getting both the leaves and the bottom of the trumpet in focus is usually a very difficult proposition.  So this approach is a good workaround for that kind of shot.  Once again, the post processing in the Affinity Photo software is not up to the standards I expect with Capture One.  But it’s a start.

28JUN2021 – Photography – Focus Stack – Crown of Thorns

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Here’s another focus stack.  Since this plant has plenty of depth this is a more interesting study.  The range of focus extends from the screen behind the plant all the way forward to the closest branches.  By the way, setting up that sheet was more of an obstacle than everything else I had to do for this shot.  It’s one of Camera Girl’s old bedsheets and I had to rig a couple of heavy chairs onto the table behind the plant and move stuff around.  It tells me I guess I should get a screen for this kind of thing.

In the second shot you can begin to see the limitations of the Affinity software I used for post processing.  I can begin to see some brightness problems showing up in the spines.  Thanks to Camera Girl for the loan of her Crown of Thorns houseplant and bedsheet.

27JUN2021 – Photography – Focus Stack – Clematis Flower

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Okay, enough bugs for a while.  let’s start with this clematis flower.  I just stuck it on a flat background so the depth of field is limited. But still an interesting experiment.

 

One limitation that I have noticed is that the Affinity Photo software that does the focus stacking is not as capable as the post processing software (Capture One) that I typically use for all my other photos.  So cleaning up the results of the photo stack isn’t as satisfactory.

26JUN2021 – Photography – Focus Stack – Eyed Click Beetle

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Continuing with my dead insect theme here is a large Eyed Click Beetle – Alaus oculatus who has joined my museum of dead bugs.  No anthropomorphizing this insect with a name like Bob.  I’ll call him Clicky because he used to click before he became dead.  Camera Girl felt sad because he was going to meet his maker.  But then I told her he was eating her vegetables.  She said everybody’s got to eat but I think it put things in perspective.