Hey David - I meant to comment on this yesterday, but got sidetracked. I like this view of the forest floor. I spend a lot of time down there myself. The composition is pleasing with the flower seeming to lean into the frame. The curl of leaf below is nice as well. I’d have done more clean up on the scene here if it were mine, but that’s an individual thing.
As Mark points out, there are some stacking errors and artifacts scattered throughout, particularly noticeable in the leaf litter around the snow, but also elsewhere and in the flower petals and bracts. When this happens to me it’s usually because I didn’t have enough overlap of focus between each photo. I don’t use rails, but camera controlled focus bracketing and it can still show up if the steps between focus points are too far apart with an aperture too narrow. Usually with some trial and error you can figure out which combination of f/stop and distance between photos will get you the best results. Ideally you want some overlap, but not so much that you have a lot of pictures to work through.
When this happens to me I can sometimes correct it with the stacking software itself. You don’t say what you use, but I use Zerene and if you look at my Whitelip snail post, you’ll see that I took the best areas of focus from 5 photos and blended them in retouching where the focus stack broke down due to the subject moving between frames. If they align well enough it usually looks pretty good. You could have a go with that here, painting away repetitions and repeated patterns the stacking software created.
In terms of aperture, I let the background decide me on that. If I want a very smooth background, at least in a few of the photos, I choose a wider one, but that will mean you have to capture more images in the field and use a smaller step between them. Meaning move the focus rail a smaller distance each time. If the background is to be included in a flat scene for example, or if it’s a very far distance behind, you can stop down and still have the background you want. Fewer photos in the field and you can move the camera a longer distance between them as well.
I also see some “goopiness” around bits of the snow that could mean you created a DMap stack - depth mapping sometimes misses areas where there is a bigger difference in focus point from one frame to the next whereas PMax might get it. If I choose a DMap image for my starting point I will often paint in details from the PMax image during retouching. If this is all new to you, I apologize. Those are the two methods Zerene and Helicon Focus stacking apps use to create the final merged image. They have their good and bad points, but often one or the other works well enough to start with.
Phew. Sorry to be so long-winded. I do a lot of stacking too, and while I haven’t ever done webinars like Mark has, I have written a couple of blog posts about field/capture best practices and processing. I can link to those if you’d like.