Stack 'em Danno
My life as a macro photographer has begun; I have nothing else to do, so what the heck. Unfortunately, my timing could have been better - much like trying to make a living in music, this is not the best time to try to make a living in photography. As a professional photographer noted on his web site, in the old days he could sell a stock photo for a single use only for $250. - he now gets $1 for the same shot and unlimited uses. Ouch.
Maybe I’ll just do it for my own amusement.
Anyway, I want to show something about macro (close up, to the rest of the world) photography, which I feel like I’m actually starting to get a handle on. The problem is, as I’ve stated on several previous blogs...hmmm, maybe I’ll just show three pics and then explain.
(The following is in normal speak, rather than camera geek speak). In the world of close up shots, there is a persistent problem; if you make the opening in camera lens as large as it can be, because you know from experience that this gives those shots a nice blurry background, since you are so close to your subject you end up with a very shallow area of the shot in focus (picture 1)*. If you then try to compensate for that by making the opening in the lens smaller, because you know from experience that this will make more of the area of the shot in focus, you lose the nice blurry background (picture 2)**. Seeing is believing - the difference is pretty obvious in these two shots. (Sorry, semi-geek speak - because of the much slower shutter speed I had to use in the picture 2 so it wouldn't be under-exposed, it was almost impossible to get a really clean shot - I took four and this was the best of the lot).
This problem just doesn’t go away. Professional macro shooters often take multiple shots of the same thing with the camera mounted on a tripod and then use software to ‘stack’ those images on top of each other into one picture that has a blurry background and more of the area of the picture in focus. This is quite time consuming and often prone to failure.
And then along came Olympus (and maybe Panasonic? I haven’t used a Panasonic so I’m not sure, but supposedly they have this too) with a feature called ‘focus stacking’. It is a wonderful and easy way to solve the problem - it takes 9 consecutive shots automatically, slightly altering the focus from front to back on each shot and then ‘stacks’ them into one picture. The results? In a word, stunning. Picture 3*** above shows the camera/len’s magic at work - the lovely blurry background of a wide open lens (it's virtually identical to picture 1, if maybe even slightly softer) and the depth of field of a closed lens (actually, it is much, much better, with a sense of 3D and fine detail that just isn't in picture 2) all while precariously hand held as mentioned below. This is special. Yeah!
Note: Picture 3 wasn’t just handheld, it was handheld with one hand, away from my body, with nothing to stabilize the shot. And while one of the advantages of using your lens wide open is that you can then speed up the shutter and are less likely to get out of focus shots, this is just goofy, in a very good kind of goofy way.
*f/3.5 1/40 sec ISO 400
**f/14 1/5 sec ISO 400
***f/3.5 1/40 sec ISO 400