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I noticed that my neighbour had this absolutely lovely Phalaenopsis orchid so I decided to "borrow" her plant for a little while whilst I tried some more experiments with the technique of focus stacking.

This particular plant had quite small delicate flowers (probably not much more than one and a half centimetres across) and all of the buds looked to be almost perfectly formed without many noticeable bad bits.

I took it outside so I could photograph the flowers with some nice swashes of blurred background colour (grass, sky, etc) and also have some late afternoon sun behind the flowers. I shot all of these using the Nikon 105mm f/2.8 VR 1:1 macro and my Nikon D600 locked down on a tripod.

Feedback welcomed.

To see how little depth of field you might get when shooting semi macro images and why focus stacking is useful in these situations...

First up the result of focus stacking 35 images taken at 1/200 sec @ f/4 and ISO 200



secondly here is one of the single frames taken at f/4 and you can see that the depth of field doesn't even cover a single petal let alone the whole bud or the set of buds...



lastly here is a shot of the same composition stopped down to f/16; you can see I've obtained a reasonable depth of field which almost covers the major portions of a single flower but it's still really not sharp and the rest of the composition falls out of focus...



Another result of focus stacking 40 images taken at 1/125 sec @ f/4 and ISO 160



and the comparison shot stopped down to f/16 - here you can even begin to see the texture of the closer background grass and the bokeh isn't all that nice...



Finally a single bud, the result of focus stacking 22 images taken at 1/125 sec @ f/4 and ISO 100

Now, you have outdone yourself!
What a magnificent collection of fine
bloomers! I refuse to pick any as the
best. I love your colours and the
composition of each photograph.
Well done!

Rodney, all of these are very good, but especially the first and last.

In the first I would perhaps have been inclined to do some judicial pruning by removing the one flower head that is not facing forward. As it was not your plant I could understand the reluctance not to though.

Well done....again.

I wonder whether the first one would have been improved if the right rear bud were slightly out of focus. Just because you can get everything in focus doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

zafra52 wrote:Now, you have outdone yourself! What a magnificent collection of fine bloomers! I refuse to pick any as the best. I love your colours and the composition of each photograph. Well done!

Thanks Zafra

Geoff M wrote:Rodney, all of these are very good, but especially the first and last. In the first I would perhaps have been inclined to do some judicial pruning by removing the one flower head that is not facing forward. As it was not your plant I could understand the reluctance not to though. Well done....again.

Thanks Geoff - I could probably remove it in post

Murray Foote wrote:I wonder whether the first one would have been improved if the right rear bud were slightly out of focus. Just because you can get everything in focus doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

Thanks Murray - I could probably do that fairly easily too (possibly by stacking less of the images - although the transition from sharp to blurred may be a bit too sudden) - do you mean slightly like in the f/16 image or way like in the f/4 - if I used just the f/4 images I'd probably do the background bud and the stem oof so it looks more natural.

Very nice work there Rodney, you really are getting this focus stacking down to an art form!

Geoff M wrote:Rodney, all of these are very good, but especially the first and last.

In the first I would perhaps have been inclined to do some judicial pruning by removing the one flower head that is not facing forward. As it was not your plant I could understand the reluctance not to though.

Well done....again.

What he said. Really lovely stuff, and great specimen.

Phalaeno... frigging what ?

I like the first Rodney, the 3 flowers look like 3 little faces peering out. Nicely done.

Are you still using the helicon focus? do you delete your source images once the stack version is done?

Remorhaz wrote:

Murray Foote wrote:I wonder whether the first one would have been improved if the right rear bud were slightly out of focus. Just because you can get everything in focus doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

Thanks Murray - I could probably do that fairly easily too (possibly by stacking less of the images - although the transition from sharp to blurred may be a bit too sudden) - do you mean slightly like in the f/16 image or way like in the f/4 - if I used just the f/4 images I'd probably do the background bud and the stem oof so it looks more natural.

I was thinking of just slightly like the f16 image and you'd need to blur the stalk as well in a similar manner. One way you could do it in Photoshop would be to put a merged layer at the top (select all layers then [Ctrl][Alt][Shit][E], whoops I meant to say [Shift], severely blur that layer, mask to restrict the blur and then fade it back with the opacity slider as far as seemed appropriate.

The way we see is that we focus on particular things and ignore the rest. It can help to have huge depth of field where the composition leads your eye to loop around and explore but I don't think that this applies to this image. I suspect having the rear flower a bit out of focus will complement the main three rather than competing with them somewhat.

aim54x wrote:Very nice work there Rodney, you really are getting this focus stacking down to an art form!

Thanks Cam - practice hey

Reschsmooth wrote:Really lovely stuff, and great specimen.

- focus stacking with the medium format perhaps?

biggerry wrote:Phalaeno... frigging what ? I like the first Rodney, the 3 flowers look like 3 little faces peering out. Nicely done. Are you still using the helicon focus? do you delete your source images once the stack version is done?

Lol - you know I had to look it up

Still using Helicon - I'll maybe have to try and compare the others one day...
...and you know I'm not Suren so... yes I still have all the source images - even the sets I took but didn't even stack... hard drives are cheap - plus every digital image I've ever taken that I havn't deleted since 1998 takes up just over 1TB so it all fits on one drive

Murray Foote wrote:I was thinking of just slightly like the f16 image and you'd need to blur the stalk as well in a similar manner. One way you could do it in Photoshop would be to put a merged layer at the top (select all layers then [Ctrl][Alt][Shit][E], whoops I meant to say [Shift], severely blur that layer, mask to restrict the blur and then fade it back with the opacity slider as far as seemed appropriate. The way we see is that we focus on particular things and ignore the rest. It can help to have huge depth of field where the composition leads your eye to loop around and explore but I don't think that this applies to this image. I suspect having the rear flower a bit out of focus will complement the main three rather than competing with them somewhat.

Thanks Murray - I had tried just bringing the stacked image and the f/16 image into PS as two layers and then masked and revealed/blended in the f/16 flower and stem but it just didn't look great - I may try the same with an f/4 one to see if having it more oof works better.

Remorhaz wrote:...and you know I'm not Suren so... yes I still have all the source images - even the sets I took but didn't even stack... hard drives are cheap - plus every digital image I've ever taken that I havn't deleted since 1998 takes up just over 1TB so it all fits on one drive

Wow I am amazed, when did you start shooting RAW?

aim54x wrote:

Remorhaz wrote:...and you know I'm not Suren so... yes I still have all the source images - even the sets I took but didn't even stack... hard drives are cheap - plus every digital image I've ever taken that I havn't deleted since 1998 takes up just over 1TB so it all fits on one drive

Wow I am amazed, when did you start shooting RAW?

Soon after I got my first D-SLR (end of 2009) - so yes in reality I only have less than 3 years worth of the larger RAW files to deal with so far (about 50,000 RAW's)

Note also that I take very very few images into PS so I don't have the problem of storing a lot of 1GB layered PSD files - so all my "edits" to almost all these images are stored in my Lightroom Catalog file (2.5GB)

I figure for now with hard drive sizes doubling each year I hope to be good for a little while - my main master repository is on a 2TB portable hard drive which I connect to my MBP when I need it