Member-only story
Have you ever tried taking a close up photo of a beautiful flower using a telephoto lens and realized after focusing that most of the flower is still blurry due to depth of field?
It’s a challenge because you often need a wide open aperture in order to let enough light in to get the shot without too much noise but doing so also means a very shallow depth of field when what you really want is a large depth of field.
This doesn’t only apply to close up photos of flowers and such either. This technique can also be used in landscape photography in order to maximize the depth of field without suffering the diffraction effects of stopping the aperture right down to f/32 or something.
How to focus stack
In order to maximize the depth of field without stopping the aperture right down you need to take a series of photos at a shallower depth of field and then use software to analyze the images, align them and stack the sharpest focused regions of each image on top of each other.
Take this series of images of a drill bit.
I wouldn’t recommend shooting a stack at f/2.8 like I did here. I mostly did this for illustration purposes. That said, you can certainly do it and it does stack nicely if you’re using good software for doing it.
In order to take the shots you should put the camera on a tripod or other stable surface to minimize the movement between each shot. The closer to exact each shot is the more likely it is to work.
Put the camera in manual focus mode and focus on the closest part of the image you want in focus. Take a shot. Twist the focus ring back slightly to move the focal point. Repeat this as much as required to include all the areas you want to be in sharp focus in the final image.
Hint: Using the live view on the camera will help visualize the depth of field for each shot so you make sure you get it all.
NOTE: On Nikon DSLR’s this will mean turning on the exposure preview in live view mode.
Once you’ve taken the photos, download them onto the computer and do any post processing you want. It’s often possible to post process one and then batch those changes across the rest of the…
