Focus stacking

You may recall in an earlier blog, I spoke about an entry I made to the weekly photo challenge. The image I submitted had been stacked using a piece of software called Helicon Focus. This program allows you to do something called focus stacking which is a technique used to merge multiple images  with the goal of creating a single image with a much greater depth of field. This is particularly useful in Macro photography as the depth of field is usually quite shallow which often means part of your subject is out of focus.

Of course the traditional way of trying to combat this is having LOTS of light in your shot and increasing your aperture (f number). However if, like me, you don't have masses of expensive lighting equipment then focus stacking may help you! 

Here's a brief run through of what I did to stack the images, it is REALLY simple, and the software I've linked has a really good tutorial built in to it.

I took 15 images of my subject, in this case, a watch. I started by focusing on the point at the lowest part of the frame, and then gradually increasing the focus for each shot. Below are a selection of the shots that I took.

I'd probably recommend taking between 15 and 20 shots. The more the better! Anyway, once you have your shots, load up Helicon Focus and follow the instructions within the software. You should end up with an image like the following...

The finished result

The above is a combination of all the images I took. There is some loss of detail on the left hand side of the links. I'm sure this could be ironed out, there are loads of settings within the software that you can play around with to achieve your perfect results.  Obviously, this technique is only really going to work on still life subjects, unless you find a particularly well behaved insect that stays still for all of your photos!