Experiment in selective focus stacking

I picked up a few Osteospermums at the grocery store last week and noticed the water drops from a relatively gentle overnight rain on them a morning or two later. I did some full stacks, but also decided to play with trying to select a particular band of the flower for focusing, so i shot this stack with my widest aperture, trying to include the water drops and the center of the flower.

What technical feedback would you like if any?

Anything. It was fairly breezy, so I had to clean up some double images from the stacking-did I get them all?

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

Did this focus selection work? Would it have been better to extend the in-focus area all the way to the front edge of the petals?

Pertinent technical details or techniques:

5DIII, EF180mm, f/3.5 macro, tripod, f/3.5, 1/5000, iso 400, manual exposure, manual focus, seven image stack. Stack processed in Helicon Focus, further processing in LR & PS CC. Images taken on April 30th around 8:25 am.

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1 Like

Iā€™d say your DOF certainly directs the attention to the colorful center. Nice background.

Dennis: The final result looks good to me and the fade from sharp focus on the near petals and center to the OOF rear petals is well done. I donā€™t do stacking so a lot of my single capture images look a lot like this. I suppose stacking might give you more flexibility and certainly better BG control so I can see where its appropriate. For me I donā€™t need to see the entire flower sharp but that would work OK too. >=))>

A good portrait to my favorite model. For my personal way of shooting the drops donā€™t match with softness. My be the image would enhance with all in focus. What do you think about?

The droplets closest to the center of the flower should be sharp as they are essential to the comp. You may have missed a couple of slices. The background petals look good and presented. Otherwise, your technique with practice can provide optimal results. ā€¦Jim

Dennis, I agree about the value of choosing the area of focus during a stack and like your choice here. The one thing that catches my eyes here is how fast the focus changes. It may be worth trying your first and last slice at a smaller f-stop, to better ā€œblendā€ the in focus and oof parts of the flower.

Excellent idea Mark. Thank you for that thought.