Something a little different to a landscape for today. Just outside my front door there’s this rather pretty vine, commonly known as a bleeding heart vine. The flowers are not huge, so I needed to get quite close to get an image in which you’d be able to see the pretty red flower. Problem when you get close is that it’s difficult to keep all the flower in focus.
You may have heard of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography where a number of images are taken of a scene and then blended in a manner to avoid deep shadows and blown out highlights. Focus stacking is a similar concept, but instead of a range of exposures being blended, a range of focus points are blended.
The image below is made up of ten images, each focussed at a slightly different point on the bloom. In this instance the task was automated using an app on my phone called Helicon Remote. This is very easy to use. You just select the two ends of the focus range and it then controls the camera … modifying focus and taking the photos. Next, you’ll need something like Photoshop to stack the images together. Here’s a YouTube clip that might help explain how to do this.
So, here’s the photo. As I said at the start … something a little different to a landscape;-)
