Project - supplement

Slices - Chips

To go with Depth of field magic  (project).

The challenge was to take a photo of a number of stacks of casino chips going back some way with the distance, closed up with a telephoto lens and starting at the front of the image.

The image above shows the arrangement of the chips and coins, the camera being out of shot on the right hand side. A Nikon 105mm macro lens was being used on a DX camera (D300).

The resulting image I was after compresses the distance from front (shown on right above) to the back (red and green stacks of chips, while having it in focus throughout the image. Normally with a photo like this one part of the depth would be in focus.

Such as:-

In this focusing on the fallen stacks of blue and red chips. You can see that neither the front chips or the blue stack and beyond is in focus.

Taking 17 images, I call them slices but some call it a stack, and using a program that combines the sharpest pats, in this case Helicon Focus the result I obtained is:-

To see a large copy the resulting image in a new browser window, that I produced, and which has had no further editing click here.

Some of the screen displays of the computer I had connected to the camera are shown in the article Capturing slices with a Nikon DSLR.

Slices set  - click here to download zip file.  This contains a series of 17 photos that are focused at different points, and have combined the sharpest parts of each to produce a single sharp photograph through the focusing range. You can download this as a zip file that includes the 17 source photos plus the resulting image I created with Helicon Focus.

To build your own photo with this set of slices you don't need the output file, this has a longer name while the slices are just a list of image numbers in order.  So put just the slice images into a folder where you can find it.

You can also look at any of these files on any photo viewer or editor. They are all jpg's.

Details of what to do is included in the Depth of field magic  (project), that is based upon these images. It also has photos of sections of the resulting image.

How these slices were created is covered in the article Capturing slices with a Nikon DSLR.

Animation of what is happening

The animation available from the link below illustrates this, shown at 25% size. The top image is showing the images taken one by one, the display above shows you which one it is and clicking on any of these will show that shot, stopping the animation. Below this is a static image that is the result, and below this image is a set of controls to control the top image display, it can be stopped, started, slowed down or speeded up. 

Click here to see the animation in a new window, close the new window to get back here.