Spot the difference

First time I've really tried this. Both have the same base shot taken at F8 5:1 but the first one has detail focus stacked back onto it from shots taken at F4.
Think it's worth trying it again .

Brian V.

Click on Pics for larger size

IMAGE LINK: http://farm3.static.fl​ickr.com …37023529_80e2ce​9183_o.jpg

IMAGE LINK: http://farm3.static.fl​ickr.com …37023533_1b0ea1​f03e_o.jpg

How do u have time to change the aperture without moving from the shot to stack it

lance v wrote in post #4569893
How do u have time to change the aperture without moving from the shot to stack it

Lance - the springtail was fairly occupied and not moving- the main difficulty is changing the aperture without moving the camera angle but I was doing my normal trick of resting the end of the lens on the water barrel I was shooting the springtail on- this makes it a bit easier.
Brian V.

Looks like it worked really well Brian. I take it the main reason you did this was to get a reasonable amount of the background in focus?

LordV wrote in post #4569904
Lance - the springtail was fairly occupied and not moving- the main difficulty is changing the aperture without moving the camera angle but I was doing my normal trick of resting the end of the lens on the water barrel I was shooting the springtail on- this makes it a bit easier.
Brian V.

O ok cheers, iv yet to find one of these guys that has stayed still at all!

I opened them both in a new tab and then jumped back and forth between the images. Was the critter eating? It looks like it moved between frames (the head and even the body changed shape).

Also if you are going to take a base image and then stack at a lower Fstop then why not take the base at F11 or 16 (although the MPE will give you a better image at F14 and 5x than at F16 -IMHO it's a focusing issue with that lens).

Excellent detail in the stacked image!

Thanks for the comments- just a quick experiment.
Alistair- Yes was just seeing if this was possible to remove the sharp OOF boundaries you sometimes get when focus stacking. Also helps smooth out any missing slices in the open aperture series.

John - This was my first real go at this, might try smaller apertures but suspect I might also have to adjust the FEC to do that- the F8 shot came out noticeably darker than the other shots but I was using -ve FEC on my normal settings because of the dark BG.

Brian V.

doesn't look much improvement if any over your 2 shot stacks at f6.3 or whatever.

LordV wrote in post #4570084
John - This was my first real go at this, might try smaller apertures but suspect I might also have to adjust the FEC to do that- the F8 shot came out noticeably darker than the other shots but I was using -ve FEC on my normal settings because of the dark BG.

Brian V.

I know that you and I don't agree on this one, but watch your flash duration as you decrease the aperture...

you can tell the different from the stack one. don't know about the the other thing you guys are mentioning but i'm still learning .

Bill

the first ones body is a lot sharper and the tiny hairs on its back are all in focus.