Comfort Zone(s) (MM213)

KangaZu has set the excellent theme of out of my comfort zone for this week's mono Monday and I did think of a selfie or some other form of portrait but in the end decided on this image as it includes a couple of comfort zone issues.  

1st off - these are the memory card and hard drive removed from my laptop - they would have been out of my comfort zone a while ago but since I appear to have fixed the laptop and doubled the memory I guess that is not quite what it was then.  The hard drive is shot, replaced by an SSD, but the memory would probably be ok in another PC - I just decided not to risk having two different types in as the hassle of getting the board out again was more than the likely improvement. If I do ever buy another laptop I'll make sure there is access into the case from both sides rather than having to split the case and take everything out just to get to the memory slots.

2nd - focus stacking - which is one of those aspects of photography I've never quite managed to get the hang of but with some practice I'm going to assume it will come to me eventually.  You can see top left the grain in the table top is not in focus, and having taken the source photographs in overhead light the shadows make it difficult to mask out the wood and replace it with a plain background.   I'm aiming to get to this sort of thing - demonstrated here by Thomas Heaton who's You Tube channel I am finding quite illuminating.

13 images, taken with the camera controlled via Helicon Remote from the laptop and then stacked together in Helicon Focus.  I'll add one of the original 13 as an extra - it should be possible to see the depth of field each of the source images contributes to the composite final.

Still not sorted out how to get the Lightroom catalogues to sync together :-)