Project - supplement

Slices - Red flower

To go with Depth of field magic  (project).

See also both the coins and chips Project supplements, as these show examples of the layout and give perhaps a better understanding of what of happening.

The challenge on this page is to take a number of flower blooms and leaves from close up and get everything in focus.  Often with flower photography and close ups of still life and macro its very difficult to get enough depth of field to get everything in focus.

A typical best shot might look like the one below:-

Here I have managed, by focusing on the rear of the two front flowers to just about get away with it, but the centres of the two front flowers, forward petals and much of the background is out of focus. If we were to blow this up larger it becomes far more noticeable.

By taking 22 photographs (slices) with slightly different focus, and combining these we can get a sharp image throughout.

The resulting image is:-

If you look at the larger version of this image, click here to see it, you will see the very fine details including hairs on the left top centre between the two red flowers and sharpness throughout.

To experiment yourself, with my set of slices, use the slices set below. Try it with all slices and then again with alternate ones omitted. Also try using the front ones but stopping at a point to see how you can control what is in and what is not in focus with this technique.

From this you will start to see how, in many other situations, you could use this to not only extend but to control depth of field in your photographs.

Slices set  - click here to download zip file. We have used a series of 22 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 22 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 in any photo viewer or editor. They are all jpg's.

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.

Details of what to do is included in the Depth of field magic  (project).

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.