#Photo150

I'm into Week 1 of this year's photo challenge. My theory is if I can manage one good session a week with the camera, I should be able to sustain my efforts.

In this case I'm trying something I've dabbled with before. It's a technique known as focus stacking. Instead of taking one image at a small aperture, you take a series of photos. The series is taken at a much wider aperture (I went with f5.6). Most lenses reach their peak optical performance at f5.6-f8. Beyond that the image starts to soften with diffraction. Each photo in the series has a different focal plane, so you end up taking a series of 'slices' of the subject. I started with the closest part of the flower in focus and then shifted the focal point further and further back. You then stack all the photos in a stacking program so it merges all the focused areas into one.

In this case I was taken with the contrast between the white flower in this bed, and all the much smaller red flowers in the background.

White on ScarletGarden flower bed

Two other things are important here. The first is that the camera doesn't move, so a good tripod is essential. The second is that the subject doesn't move either. Ideally you should also shot in Manual Mode and manually focus the lens.

The image was a composite of five photos, stacked in Helicon Focus 7. Each photo was taken with a Sony a7Riii camera and a Voigtländer 110/2.5 Macro lens at 1/100sec, and f5.6.