May 31, 2021

A Spring Garden

With Provincial COVID-19 restrictions ruling out photographing people, and suggesting people limit their travel, I have done little in the way of photography. One element of the new Canon EOS 5R that continues to intrigue me is the "focus bracketing" option, which in theory makes in the field (and even hand-held) focus stacking surprisingly easy. I experimented a little with the approach on New Year's Day, and was very pleased with the results.

Digital original, 60 frame focus blend


After some hand-held experiments (which for the most part failed), I moved the camera back on to the tripod, and used a more traditional approach. While the default in camera is set to a 20 image stack, it ended up that I needed 60 frames to cover the above composition of some forget-me-nots. The final assembled image needed some manual correction of blending errors, but overall, was really pleasing.

Digital original, 68 image focus blend

As convenient as the automatic focus bracketing is, it really works best with a static subject; the above image of hostas provided the perfect subject, and a camera setting of 70 images provided the 68 frames needed to get infinite depth of field, without any diffraction compromise. Unlike the first image, this needed no manual tweaking to generate the final composition.

Digital original, 2 image focus blend
The last image is less of a focus stack, and more just a two-frame blend - an f/11 image of the centre of the dandelion, and then an f/2.8 image for a super silky background.

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