Focus stacking – Part A

After weeks of preparation, i finally set out to Botanical Gardens to nail the shot using the concept of focus stacking. I am happy to say that the experiment above has been a great success!

It all began on 15 May 2010, when i was making my usual walk around Botanical Gardens to take photos. I spotted this interesting looking cactus and ran a few shots at it. When i came home and uploaded the photos, below what was i got:

Click on it for larger view

I’m pretty pleased with the composition and stuff. But i hated the shallow depth of field. Some might argue it helps to lead viewers eye to the core but i believe the cactus lines have done enough a job in that department. I wanted other parts of the photo to be focused as well.

I told myself surely i had to come back again to work on the same shot. But how?

Thankfully, i remembered Yusuf once mentioned the use of focus stacking for one of my food shots.

In case you don’t know, focus stacking basically means taking multiple photos of the same subject and use post-processing to align the focused portion of each image into one final-and-focused image. It is a really simple technique that everyone can use on their photos. But i shall leave the specifics to the next post.

In the mean time, here’s what you need:

• A very very very very steady tripod. I’m not referring to those free tripods that comes with your DSLR purchase. Technically it works but i can bet a million bucks these tripods will give you hell before anything else. In my case i used a Manfrotto 055XPROB and Manfrotto 410 junior gear head. Both are, in my honest opinion, a very hardcore combination in terms of stability, durability and precision.

My setup at the location

• Either a long lens or a macro lens for best results. The whole thing about using focus stacking to get an overall-focused image, is because of shallow depth of field. Therefore, macro and long lens will yield less depth of field because one is very close to subject while the other has a long focal length. Not to say that wide lens won’t work but you probably will not see much significance compared to the other lens. In my case, I was using a Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 compact macro paired with a LED ring light (not particularly useful on a sunny day though)

• Super precision matt focusing screen for manual focusing. Locking your camera on a tripod means you cannot move the camera (duh) and rely on your in-camera focus points to focus different parts of the image. This might sound a bit confusing but i will explain more in my next post. Here, i used a Canon Es-S focusing screen and paired it with my 5D Classic.

• A lot of patience. I spent no less than 30 minutes at the place just to get the composition and the tripod positioning and lighting right. Focus staking will require some understanding of depth (foreground, middleground and background).

• Last but not least, you need a proper post processing software to handle focus stacking. Thankfully, Adobe CS4 has that feature

Ok. That’s all for this post. More information on how to nail the shot, will be in the next post.

PS: I’m still in the run for the OMY Photo Blogger of the Year award. If possible, vote for me k?

PSS: I finally did the video interview with OMY. To put it simply, i was freaking nervous and fumbled badly. There’s a reason why i choose to stay behind the lens. In any case, i was nervous during the video interview and wrongly said that the vintage cameras belonged to me. The cameras belong to my friend Mike and not me! So if you ever find it strange why i said they are mine and the blog post said they are Mike’s, now you know.

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