I found this large Chicken of the Woods mushroom in a spot that gets mottled late afternoon sun. The 'shroom is about 18 inches tall and 24 inches wide (2nd posted pic.). I spent some time shooting details and decided that I like this wavy edge. (An 11 shot stack, 7D2, 180 mm macro, 1/10 s, f/13, iso 800, tripod, mirror lock-up and 2 s shutter delay)
The entire mushroom
Oh wow, what a nice find, Mark. Thank you for sharing an over all view of the mushroom, to give a sense of what it looks like. The details, colors and shapes in the macro version is impressive and very much inviting. My eye follows all the way through the image with the shapes and lines. A real frame filler of the edge of this mushroom. Very nice.
Wow indeed! What an amazing find, and a wonderful detail shot. Perfect stacking, amazing colors and shapes!
Mark this is incredible. With your equipment, did you manually adjust focus for stacking?
I don’t think the 7D2 does focus stacking, does it?
David, this is done manually. While I see a body with focus stacking capability in my future (1-2 yrs), the first questions I will explore are, “How effective is the internal stacking and how hard is it to clean up the artifacts?” With separate software, there’s a lot of clean up that is best done using the individual slices.
Thanks Mark,
I guess some cameras can do focus stacking in the camera, mine works differently. I select the starting focus point and ending focus point, and specify how far each focus point should be from the other (the step). Then the camera starts taking separate images until it gets to the end focus point. So I still have all my separate images to merge in HeliconFocus.
Cheers,
David
I use a method similar to @David_Bostock, but I have to set the frame number so I will overshoot the ending point and delete the extra frames. A couple of runs and some ESP will let me dial in the settings. Then I stack with Zerene (and I think it is very similar to Helicon). If I choose close enough DOF spacing on the shots, there are no artifacts on any layers to clean up. Using PS would be a very different story if there are areas of overlap, as it can’t compensate for the focus blooming of something like a Hibiscus with its very 3D stamen. Zerene (and I assume Helicon) can. Any artifacts after processing are minor and generally easy to clean up with the editing features in Zerene or a little PS work in some cases.
But the individual frames can be obtained with careful manual focus incrementing – the in-camera bracketing is just a very nice convenience.
