Tiny

Flower Friday: basil flowers in the sunshine

This looks as though it could have been taken somewhere in Mediterranean sunshine, or at the very least a hot house protected from this morning's frost.  It is actually the basil growing on our kitchen window cill, basking in this morning's sunshine.  The flowers really are tiny so this shot has been heavily cropped to get you in this close.  

I've had to focus merge a series of 16 shots to get the whole of the flower in focus, even though it is tiny.  That's a bit of a problem with the Nikon 105mm macro lens that I have as it "focus breathes" (as they say).  In other words, the size of the image increases or decreases as you focus nearer or further away, even though the focal length of the lens is a fixed prime.  It only becomes an issue when you attempt to focus merge a series of shots to create a single composite image, which I've started trying to do recently. I am still trying to work out where the boundaries are of what can be achieved before the problem becomes obvious in the resulting merged shot.  

There seem to be three answers to this problem.  The first solution is that I don't think that the 200mm Nikon macro lens has this "feature", so I could try to get one, although its not cheap, it is big and heavy, and I've never yet seen one for sale second hand.  The other solution is presumably some sort of device that moves the subject so that the lens focus remains static - which also sounds expensive and would mean that it could only be used in a studio situation

In practice I think that the real answer is going to be to put up with the constraint and recognise that macro shots have a limited depth of field that no amount of software trickery is going to get me around :-)