Ha! I can’t stop with these guys and I think this one works better than the little group I posted before. The background is cleaner and less distracting because it doesn’t include any other moss. It’s probably more warrior moss, but I don’t have a solid ID. It’s on the side of the driveway near the other little scene. My whole yard is full of this stuff much to my delight.
IRL it’s about an inch high, maybe a little less. The isolated nature of the pair attracted me as well as the left over raindrops. The OOF areas on the bottom and sides make this feel different to me as well although some of the areas are quite crisp. I was blown away by the magnified dirt in the water on the lower sporophyte. I didn’t see it until I got into a 200% magnification for the retouching.
Specific Feedback Requested
This is another stack (PMax this time) and I did some retouching, but it didn’t need a lot. How does it look? Any feedback welcome.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Lumix G9
Leica DG 45mm f/2.8 macro
f/5 | 1/25 sec | ISO 200
beanbag on the ground to support
21 image stack - I think I used the 0/+/- method because it was difficult to see which bit was actually closest to the lens. Not sure I needed this many images, but it worked pretty well.
Lr to process for exposure, clarity & texture, sharpening & nr. I might have adjusted the white balance as well. Zerene for stacking & retouching. Lr again for a little crop to remove distractions.
I like this one even better, Kris, for the reasons you gave. I am even more amazed knowing that it is so short. Just looking at your wonderful presentation of it, I would have guessed at least 3 or 4 inches tall! Very nice. That “rock” on the left is a nice addition too.
Kris, the two “little stems” and the water drops look great and are nicely isolated. The bits of sharpness at the bottom add nicely to the viewing. The stack looks good, although if I look really hard at the largest version I see some orange fringing around the lower parts of the righthand stem against the darker background. That’s hard to see in the smaller versions and someone without lots of stacking experience is unlikely to notice.
Sometimes I think I’m done retouching and bring shots back to Lr only to discover I missed some bits. Once I had to re-import 6 different retouched images. OMG. Luckily Zerene lets you do that if you save the work or leave it open. So now I’m going over each part of the retouched image a bunch of times. Just leaving it and doing something else for a while is useful for finding tiny bits like this although I don’t quite know if I could fix it if I spotted it. Maybe I should open a stacking discussion so we can banter. I’ve discovered quite a bit on my own, but like anything, there’s always more to learn.
This is really nice. I think it is a definite improvement over the previous “version” in terms of composition and background separation, and the “water drop world” is a very nice detail. If anything I feel the stack might be a bit shallow (it loos like the middle of the rightmost “stem” is OOF), but you are definitely improving! Retouching stacks is always a bit of a bother, but you have done well here.
I think you have mentioned this before, but you could always do both DMap and PMax stacks and see what turns out to be the best starting points. Some details might be better in one of the methods and could serve as a good retouching source. That being said I always struggle with DMap myself. Never seem to get the threshold choice good on the first few tries.
