Focus Stack.

Back to an “A Year With My Camera” assignment; a duty that I’ve been neglecting recently, along with several others. The last four weeks have been about macro which I’ve always enjoyed and with which I am fairly comfortable. Now focus stacking is different, I’ve known of its existence and understood the theory but have never practiced it. The actual taking of the set of ten pictures (of which I used five) was o.k, I deliberately did it out of doors without too much consideration for the breeze as Photoshop seems to be fairly good at aligning images and I had been advised that it was possible to work without a tripod. I did try letting PS merge the images but it produced some strange artefacts that I found difficult to understand, let alone fix. I ended up manually painting the layer masks which was far more successful, there were still a few problems which I could have avoided had I repeated the exercise and taken more care. What I forgot to do was to take a picture with a small aperture for comparison, though I do know what to expect: a less sharp flower and a sharper background.

The extra is one of the component images.
 
I’ve just posted last Monday’s, “Barnston Monument.”