Macro Stacking

[Carr0t]

Has anyone got any experience of doing this? I picked up a Canon 100mm f/2.8 (Not the L. God I wish I could afford any L series kit ) secondhand a while back. Having tons of fun with it, but when you're 15cm from your target (End of lens. 30cm from the sensor) at about f/8 the depth of field is *tiny* (like, less than 1mm). What I want to try and do is get images of insects and such.

I tried a few with spiders, and firstly i'm not stable enough to get a good shot that accurately handheld. I have to have a tripod and a remote shutter to avoid moving the tiny amount that results in going out of focus. But even then I find that for e.g. the spider face is in focus, but the body, legs etc are hugely blurred. By the time i've made focus adjustments the insect has generally moved. So I tried setting the camera to continuous shooting and just rocking backwards and forwards very slightly to get shots over a range of focuses. I ended up with about 30 images, of which 5-6 were usable, and when I stacked them it was definitely better than a single tripod image (Probably doesn't help that my 650D shoots at 5fps, but only has enough buffer for 8 shots so the FPS slows right down to 1 or 2 shots/sec after less than 2 seconds), but I still had odd spots and bands that were blurred where i'd not captured anything in focus at that point in any of the shots.

Anyone else got experience with it and can offer some advice? I'm basically using the auto-stack feature in Photoshop CS6 to stack the images. I don't want to think about that being something I should do by hand...

[smilodon]

I do a lot of focus stacking and PS is the way to go definately. You're doing it right as well. However for an ideal result you should use manual focus and carefully move the focus point from the closest point of your subject to the farthest. The more shots you get, up to a point, the better and five or six for an insect through a macro lens sounds about right. As you mentioned though time is the limiting factor. I'm photographing static products which don't move, in a studio, so I can take as long as I like to get my shots. I'm also using a camera tethered to a PC and using bespoke focus stacking software that does all the focus adjustments and image capture automatically. You're outside chasing bugs! It's always going to be tough to the point of impossible to get the correct number of clean images. Apart from the technique you mentioned of rocking the tripod and burst shooting there are a few of other options if you want to get serious.

In macro photography there are only two things that affect DoF, aperture and magnification. However as you have mentioned reducing aperture size doesn't have the same effect as in normal photography. Even at f 16 - 22 the DoF will be very shallow and you'll loose crucial sharpness due to diffraction in the lens. You could decrease magnification but then your subject gets much smaller in the frame. So unless you're shooting with a monster Canon 5D Mk2 you'll loose crucial detail when you crop your images. There are a few options though

First - shoot the bug in profile so that it is at it's narrowest point front to back. Shooting side on means most of the insect will appear to be in focus. Shooting front to back will show a serious fall of in focus towards the back of the subject as you're finding. That sort of dictates your composition though, which might not be ideal.

Second - kill it! You'd be amazed at how many stunning photographs of insect are actually of dead things. Commercial shooters on a budget will normally catch and kill the insect before taking it into a studio, setting up the shot, setting the lighting and using focus stacking software to get the images. A pretty significant number of wildlife pro's will do the same.

Third - stun it! Well actually chill it to be exact. Again you catch the bug, but this time just pop it in a tupperware box and shove it in the freezer for five minutes. The bug sort of goes into a coma and when you retrieve it you have several minutes with a motionless insect that you can photograph carefully.

Forth - photograph spiders. Spiders are pretty hardcore killers and so don't tend to run away from much. Plus they are patient ambush hunters which means they sit for hours motionless in their webs and only move when something get caught in the web. This often gives a 'tog enough time to set up carefully and photograph their subject without any movement.

Fifth - practice on inanimate objects. You're probably trying to shoot the toughest macro subject there is. It takes time to work out the characteristics of your lens, how many focus steps you need at a certain distance and for a certain size subject etc. There's no easy set of rules for this, you just have to get a feel for it. Learning on insects will be very hard as they fly away at lot. They also move and sometimes movement can create the effect of poor focus when in fact you were spot on but the bug moved in the frame. Bugs move very fast and even at quite high shutter speeds they can still create motion blur, especially in their antenna, wings and legs. So try perfecting macro techniques on static objects rather than insects first. then get back out and chase the bugs

Hope this helps

[Carr0t]

Awesome Ta! What software are you using to control focus? I feel like that would be really handy for minimal shake. At the moment I have to manual focus (AF seems rubbish at macro distances) and use the LCD not the viewfinder to zoom in to 10x magnification to make sure i've got the focus. And of course all my handling of the camera and focusing ring shakes it. I'm planning on a focusing rail to help with that, but software to do it all from a connected laptop might be even better.

[smilodon]

It's not going to be of much use to you but the software is Control My Nikon :eyebrow:

I'm sure Canon do something similar?

[Carr0t]

Ahha. For some reason I thought you had Canon gear. The EOS Utility allows me to take a shot and adjust the focus manually through the shoftware using a fine grained stepping adjust for the next shot, but I was hoping there'd be something where I could specify the minimum and maximum focus, the number of shots I wanted/size of the focus step, and then set it running as fast as the camera could shoot. Will keep digging.

[smilodon]

DZ might have an idea

[Carr0t]

MagicLantern appears to have exactly what I want built into the camera, but that does involve flashing the firmware of my camera with an open source release, and the latest stable build download page doesn't support my camera even though the homepage claims the software does... I'm not convinced I want to try that just yet

[Carr0t]

Decided to try some bits inside with jewellery as it'd got bark out by the time we got home. Nicked the wife's rings - https://www.flickr.com/photos/c4rr07/15348779166/ Still blurred around the edges. I think I made the focus jumps too large because I was impatient. Will try DslrDashboard next as some has suggested that can do it automatically.

[DrunkenZombiee]

Sorry for the late reply. Yes Magic lantern does this for you!

Let me know if you need help as I have done a few of these.

DZ