David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Yellow Cactus Flower. I was reviewing image from previous years and realised that I may have missed the cactus blooming. I went out this afternoon and found that one was still blooming. Three images. The first “as is” from a Leica D-Lux 5. The next is from a Nikon D3x and 105 mm macro lens. The final is a composite from the Nikon D3x and 105 mm macro from 16 images combined using Helicon Focus. Let me know what you think.
Pink Flower — Macro and Wide Depth of Field. I used the pink flower from yesterday as an exercise to practice with a macro lens, flash, and Helicon Focus to get a macro image of a flower with an extreme depth of field in focus. Ten images of the flower were taken from rear focus to front focus by manually adjusting the focus distance on the lens. The raw images were processed with Capture One Pro, converted to 16 bit Tiff files, and then processed with Helicon Focus. Even though the lens was set at f/22, the actual focus plane was very narrow and thus needing several focus distances for Helicon Focus.
Macro focus stacking study using Helicon Focus. This is a composite of 30 stacked image where the focus was adjusted near to far using Helicon Remote and then combined using Helicon Focus. The images were acquired using a Nikon D3x camera and 5o mm f/1.4G lens (ISO 100, f/1.4, 1.3 sec) and ambient light. The distance between nearest and farthest focus point was ~5 inches, and the camera was ~24 inches from the nearest focus point. The Helicon Focus settings used to process the images were mode B, radius 8, smoothing 4. Other settings increased the halo.
The Purple Crocuses have started blooming across the street. This is a good sign that spring is coming. In order to get a deeper depth of field (DOF) I took several images each with slightly different focus points, and then combined the images using Helicon Focus get the composite image. The focus range was just around the flowers, keeping the background leaves out of focus.
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