Tips for Using Your Camera in a Hostile Environment

A Guest post by Saul Molloy from Shotslot.

I recently took my DSLR sailing for a week on a yacht off the West Coast of Scotland. Now my camera, though heavy and rugged-feeling, is not the most waterproof of objects, in fact there’s no real weather sealing at all and the combination of salt-water, rain, repeated physical bumps (from the waves) and the general chaos generated by having five people in an enclosed space for a week is about the worst thing I can imagine doing to my precious camera, short of introducing it repeatedly to a lump-hammer.

I know that some people are really, really careful with their cameras and I can’t blame them for being precious over such an expensive piece of kit, but I feel I need to be a bit more daring with mine – sometimes you’ve got to be somewhere fairly extreme in order to ‘get the shot’. Because of that I sat down and prepared a plan as I packed my travelling kit in order to try and minimise the chances of my precious camera’s internals becoming a useless hunk of silicone, solder and gold.

1. Get some specific camera insurance. Your standard travel insurance policy is probably no good – it usually has a clause limiting loss associated with a single item and the chances are that if your a semi-serious photographer this amount is a lot less than your kit is worth. It’s probably good practice to have insurance even on a day to day basis anyway, because it has the added advantage of giving you the confidence to take occasional calculated risks with your camera.

2. Make sure you’ve got a good camera bag to keep all your kit in one place, dry and secure. You don’t need to spend a fortune on the latest poser-pouch but you need to get something that’s specifically designed for DSLRs – shoving all your kit in any old bag isn’t so wise. Things get lost, or broken.

3. Wear your camera around your neck. I know this seems obvious but I don’t think it should be overlooked. On the boat, I often found myself shooting from a moving deck at a moving object in a light drizzle and occasional spray, whilst trying to hold my camera with one hand so I could use the other to stop myself falling into the sea. Drop your camera in 50 meters of water and it’s gone. Of course, the same is true if you drop yourself in the sea with your DSLR round your neck, but if that happens you probably have more to worry about than your camera!

4. Try and limit your camera’s exposure to risk as much as possible – whether that’s stowing it securely in an identified place when not in use, using a rain cover to minimise exposure to moisture/dust/salt etc., or even fitting a proper waterproof (and thus everything-else-proof) case, remember that careless treatment costs cameras. One note about the rain covers though, some say that there can to be issues with condensation, so if you’re repeatedly moving from a cold to warm environment you need to take extra care…personally I’m more of a plastic bag and lots of air kind of person.

5. Make sure that anybody with you understands that your camera is a precious object. Assuming you trust them not to run off with it, some people just don’t understand that they need to be careful with your stuff. Anybody who doesn’t know about cameras probably wont think that your shiny 7D (or whatever) is anything special, is fragile, or that it needs treating with care. Make sure they understand, assume nothing.

6. Don’t put your camera down there! You know where I mean – anywhere that it is at risk of being sat on, soaked, covered in noxious substances, falling off, being stolen or anything else…put it back in your bag, I appreciate that this is a pain and that you’ll miss shots, but you’ll miss many more when your camera is dead or gone. I also know that there are bags which purport to offer quick-access opportunities…great, so long as they allow you to keep your stuff all together and that they really work, and you’re willing and able to carry them around all the time.

7. Wipe your camera free of potential contaminants as soon as you can, if it’s light moisture from drizzle you need to do that with something absorbent that itsn’t just going to push moisture into the area around the buttons. I use a special, clean, monofibre cloth that I also use for cleaning my lenses. If it’s dust or anything else that might find its way onto the sensor of your camera you need to clean it especially carefully. Pay attention to the seal around the lens. Get some cotton buds or similar.

So, that’s my tips, I’d be interested in hearing yours, especially from those who have subjected their kit to extreme environments.

See more of Saul Molloy’s work at Shotslot.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

Tips for Using Your Camera in a Hostile Environment

8 On-Camera Flash Tips: How To Get Better Lighting From Your On-Camera Flash

Image by Steve Hanna

Ed Verosky is a professional photographer and author based in New York. In this article, Verosky offers up eight useful tips for anyone wanting to get better portraiture results with on-camera flash. To learn more about this subject, check out Verosky’s popular eBook, “100% Reliable Flash Photography.“

You can get great lighting for your portraits with on-camera flash. And there’s no need to purchase expensive attachments to modify your light, because everything you need is already there. The thing to understand is that your flash unit is just another light source at your disposal. Fortunately, you can learn to control the light it produces and shape it to your needs. Plus, it has the added benefit of doing some of the thinking for you when you need it to.

Since the light your flash unit produces directly can appear rather harsh, you’ll have to do one or both of the following in order to get more pleasing lighting from it:

• Create a larger, wider area of light relative to your subject.
• Illuminate your subject from an angle other than directly off the top of the camera.

The following tips will help you accomplish these goals:

1. Bounce It.

This is the number one secret weapon when it comes to on-camera flash techniques. Indoors, a typical room with light-colored walls and ceilings will provide you with all the bounce surfaces you need to make beautiful pictures. Using this technique, you can achieve softbox-style lighting, or even very broad lighting, with your flash unit alone.

Wall/ceiling bounce

Although the flash unit itself is a relatively small light source, it will cover a wide area of a wall and ceiling. This newly illuminated area will provide a wider, more diffuse “light source” for the subject.

On-camera flash bounced off wall and ceiling, camera left.

To create a portrait with the bounce technique, I generally tilt the flash unit to hit the ceiling and wall as I visualize a large softbox there, at the traditional portrait lighting angle, to my subject. This technique is very versatile as it can give you everything from very dramatic split-lighting to soft, even illumination. The subject’s orientation, and the resultant secondary bounce around the room (providing fill light) are the keys to creating the effect you want.

You can even angle your flash up and behind you to fill a small to normal-size room up with beautiful light. Spin it around and up at about 45 degrees to hit the wall and ceiling behind you.

2) Flag It.

Something most people don’t realize is that light comes out of your flash unit in a wide pattern, not in a straight beam. While most of the light is focused forward, there is a good amount actually spilling out perpendicular to the flash head lens.

Even when your flash is set to a narrow zoom, plenty of light still spills off the sides. A small flag can be used to block this effect from your subject.

When bouncing your flash, at certain angles close to that perpendicular plane, direct light will hit your subject. This isn’t necessarily something you have to avoid, but it can result in “point-and-shoot” type shadows, especially if there is a wall or other flat surface just behind your subject.

To eliminate this effect, you can place a small piece of opaque material or black foam just long enough to block the direct part of the light from hitting your subject. That one little change can make a big difference in the overall look of your shot.

3) Make It Bigger.

The size of your light source, relative to your subject, affects the overall look of the picture. This is generally because a larger light source will create a smoother transition between light and shadow, or what you might call softer light.

Craft foam bounce card with rubber band.

We’ve already discussed how bouncing your light off a wall and ceiling will make the relative size of the light illuminating your subject larger. But what if you don’t have a wall or other surface to bounce your flash off of? You can still make your light source bigger by using a simple bounce card. Because the light being directed toward your subject is at least twice as large as the face of the flash, you’ll get that much more surface area coverage. This usually results in more pleasing illumination if you’re not too far away from your subject.

Indoors, a bounce card like this has the added benefit of throwing light onto your subject from two directions, forward and bounced off the ceiling.

Simply use a piece of white cardboard or crafting foam attached to your flash head. Of course, you can orient the flash in various ways to direct the light as you like.

4) Use TTL.

Most modern flash units offer a variety of modes to shoot with. For example, I will often use my flash units off-camera, in manual mode. This allows me to maintain consistent manual control of the flash’s output power in relatively static shooting situations, like traditional portraiture.

Through-The-Lens (TTL) mode, on the other hand, puts the flash unit’s output under the control of the camera and flash. The camera and flash essentially work together to decide how much light the flash emits in order to properly expose the subject. Most modern TTL systems like Canon’s E-TTL and Nikon’s i-TTL are really great at what they do.

TTL can be used in just about every shooting situation including shooting in your camera’s manual mode, outdoors, and even when using bounce techniques. Since TTL can make life a whole lot easier for you, especially in fast-moving shooting situations, there’s no reason not to use it extensively for on-camera flash work.

When you’re ready, you might want to learn more advanced techniques using Flash Exposure Compensation and general Exposure Compensation controls in conjunction with TTL flash. These controls allow you to make easy adjustments to flash and overall exposure while still letting the TTL system do most of the thinking for you. Very handy indeed.

5) Use High-Speed Sync.

If your flash unit has a high-speed sync setting, turn it on. Most normal sync speeds for your flash will be limited to about 1/250 – 1/350 sec. That’s fine for situations where you’re in an environment with dim light. When shooting indoors, for example, you are free to shoot at any appropriate shutter speed UP TO your normal flash sync speed limit. That means you can just as easily shoot at 1/40 second to record ambient light, or faster if you choose to isolate the subject or really freeze the action.

1/2500 sec. exposure required high-speed sync for this promotional shot using f/2.8 outdoors.

However, whether indoors or out, if your exposures require a higher shutter speed, high-speed sync will allow you to shoot at virtually any shutter speed, generally up to 1/8000 sec.

You’ll usually need to work with higher shutter speeds if normal sync at your chosen aperture and ISO will result in overexposure of the ambient lighted portions of the image. This can happen easily in outdoor portrait situations, where the ambient background is rather bright, and you’d like a little fill flash on your subject. High-speed sync to the rescue!

Leaving your high-speed sync mode on all the time doesn’t mean it’s always in use. Your camera and flash will only use it if you are shooting beyond the normal sync speed. Otherwise, the flash will simply revert to its normal behavior.

6) Gel It.

DSLRs have the advantage of overall color control via the white balance (WB) setting you use. And if you’re shooting in RAW format, you easily have enough information in the image file to adjust for proper WB after the fact in something like Adobe’s Lightroom.

But there are times when you want to make sure the light coming off your flash unit is close to the same color as the ambient light. This will ensure that most of the light in your images are in the same ballpark, color temperature-wise.

Again, you’ll likely get the best results if you adjust WB during post processing, but this way the images will have a more consistent color throughout.

To bring your flash into the tungsten range of color for most ambient situations, you can use a Color Temperature Orange (CTO) filter over the flash lens. Set your camera’s WB to tungsten, if you like, and fine tune the WB in post as necessary.

7) Use The Ambient Light.

Another tell-tale sign of misused on-camera flash is the dark tunnel effect. This happens when the camera is exposing well enough for the flash illuminated subject, but not enough environment light is being recorded. Allowing the ambient light and surroundings to appear in the image will place your subject in context and give the image a sense of atmosphere.

Bounce card combined with 1/40 sec. exposure.

Even if your camera has a preset flash mode for achieving this effect, I strongly recommend switching over to the camera’s manual mode. This will allow you to manually determine slower shutter speeds to achieve exactly the amount of ambient light you want for the image.

Creative use of direct flash and long shutter speed.

I find that shutter speeds of 1/15 – 1/40 second work for most environments, including outdoors at night. Regular TTL should still be employed in order for the camera and flash to make a good determination about the exposure of the subject (what the flash is concerned with). But, you are in control of the ambient with the shutter speeds you select.

Turn It Off.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do with your on-camera flash is nothing at all. As you become more proficient with it, you might be tempted to use it all the time. However, you don’t want to become dependent on it. After all, there’s plenty of good light available in most situations. But when you need a little extra here and there, it’s nice to know you can always slap on that flash and get great shots on demand.

Sometimes flash fill light just isn’t right for the picture.

Get more of Ed’s great tips on flash photography in his e-book – 100% Reliable Flash Photography.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

8 On-Camera Flash Tips: How To Get Better Lighting From Your On-Camera Flash

10 Landscape Composition Tips: Illustrated with Pictures from Eastern Washington

A Guest post by Amar Ramesh.

Composition for a photograph is like a screenplay for a movie. If the picture isn’t composed well, it won’t strike a cord with the viewer regardless of the technical expertise or the story being told. Composition skills improve over time with constant practice. Here are some of the basic composition tips with a picture to illustrate each of those tips. The example pictures were all taken in one day while driving through Eastern Washington. These tips will help train your eyes to see the frames, an important point if you want to take great pictures.

1. Remember rule of thirds

A basic tip to remember if you want to improve your composition skills. The human eye is generally drawn to a point one third of the way from the top, bottom, right or left of any image. Keep this in mind as you work on your composition. Read more about the Rule of Thirds.

2. Negative space is your friend

Don’t always try to fill the frame. Negative space can be used to your advantage. Remember, it is just as important as the main subject.

3. Embrace Geometry

Train your eyes to look for lines, patterns and shapes. They give structure to your picture and help highlight the three dimensional quality of your subjects. Lines lead the viewers’ eyes into or out of the picture. Find a subject for the center of attraction and then find lines that lead to it.

4. Frame within frame

Used effectively, foreground framing directs the viewer’s eye right to the subject. Look for frames of different shapes and sizes. They don’t always have to be windows and fences. They could be big trees as in this example.

5. Avoid horizon in the middle

Keep your horizon level and keep it out of the center of the picture. If the sky is more interesting pull the horizon down and if the land is more interesting push the horizon up.

6. Inject life to your picture

Try to place a living being in the picture. It shows dimension and emphasizes the scale of the frame to the viewer.

7. Merges breaks a picture

When lines of the horizon intersect with your subject it distracts the viewer and moves the attention away from your subject. It can spoil a great composition. Take some time move your frame up or down, left or right to avoid the horizon merge. In the example picture below, I took extra care not to make the horizon meet the edge of the barn.

8. Lonely subjects are striking

Single subjects like trees, barns, buildings, motorcycles almost always make for great compositions. I love pulling them into the frame. Here’s a small collection of such pictures from my archives that have a single tree in the frame.

9. Size Matters

Try to include a subject that would give the viewers a scale of the scene in the frame. Use people or objects that let viewers relate size in your composition.

10. Think before you click

As is the case for any type of photography, think before you click the shutter button. Make sure there are no unnecessary objects that would affect your composition. If possible move those objects or try to move yourselves to see if you can avoid them from your composition by moving yourselves.

Following these simple techniques will improve your photography leaps and bounds and keep you ahead of the rest. These illustrations does not fit only for landscape photography but for all other types of photography. The entire collection of my eastern washington pictures can be seen here.

Amar Ramesh is an emerging photographer from Redmond WA, USA. Photography, to him is a passion with infinite opportunities and he loves to share the lessons and tips that he learned with others. Please visit his Facebook Page for more. He is also in Flickr | Twitter | Portfolio.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

10 Landscape Composition Tips: Illustrated with Pictures from Eastern Washington

10 Quick tips for Photographing Antelope Canyons

A Guest post by Amar Ramesh.

Antelope Canyons in page Arizona is one of the most exquisite gifts of nature that is generally overlooked by people traveling to Arizona.

The sandstone canyons lit from the streak of light passing right through the slots makes it one the most serene places in the world. Located at the Navajo Tribal Park near Lake Powell, these canyons have narrow paths, created by water flowing through them for millions of years. It’s a photographer’s paradise. Listed below are some the quick and easy tips that would help you take better pictures in these canyons.

1. Plan ahead

Like for any travel, do your homework and get to know the place. There are two canyons – Upper and Lower – both located in Page, AZ. Mid-day(11am-1pm) between the months of March and October is the best time to photograph these slots, with the shafts of light shining down from the openings above. There are photography tours available in both upper and lower canyons. Even though it’s a little expensive than the ordinary tour, it’s totally worth it. The guides who take you along the photography tour generally do a wonderful job helping you ‘chase’ the light. I highly recommend it.

2. Gear

Use the widest angle lens from your arsenal. You have to capture a wider area with light streaks and you absolutely need a wide angle lens to do this. If you don’t own one, try renting it. Tripod is a must and make sure you turn off image stabilization. A remote trigger would help remove the vibration caused by pressing the shutter button.

3. Try not to change lens

An important note to remember if you are shooting with a DSLR is that you should not change your lenses inside these canyons because of the amount of dust in the air. Trust me you wouldn’t want to change your lenses inside the canyons. If you have a second camera, by all means, take it along with a different lens on it. You will get a different perspective. And yes, carry a cloth to clean the lenses frequently.

4. Make use of your Live view

The canyons are generally crowded. People keep streaming in and out, in large groups. So expect people both in front and behind you. With so much going around its easy to be engrossed into the view finder. So advice would be try using the live view, as well as an articulating screen (some of the newest cameras have them). When you are ready to take the shot, you can quickly check the view finder and make sure everything is good and press the shutter. This will help you be aware of things happening around you.

5. Go Manual mode and shoot RAW

Set the camera in manual mode, shoot RAW. f11 to f18 is the sweet spot for aperture and open the shutter anywhere between 2 and 6 seconds depending on the variation in light to get the best shots. Frequently check your histogram to see how you are doing.

6. Look up

There will be times when you have to wait for a group of people to move before you can take a picture. So try to use that time to come up with different compositions. Look up and try to compose shots. Also remember including people in the picture is not always a bad thing to do.

7. Look for hidden slots

These canyons are spiritual to the Navajo tribes. They talk about the forms and shapes carved into the rock by water that flows through the canyons. One of the greatest pleasure in shooting these canyons is to see the unseen, find what is hidden, and put them in the center stage and show it in pictures. The stone in the picture below has taken a form of an eagle with open wings. To see more pictures of hidden forms visit my blogpost “Finding the hidden creatures”

8. Try to put people in the picture.

Bring some life to the pictures by placing a human subject. Here in this picture I requested a traveler from South America dressed in contrasting colors to be photographed which made the picture interesting.

9. High contrast

Look for frames with the most contrast to make it all that more interesting. You can find so many frames with high contrast between the darkest and brightest regions because of the shafts of light that penetrate from above make the center areas of the canyons brighter and the sides darker.

10. Carry a water bottle

Last but not least food is not allowed inside, so if you are planning to spend a good time in these canyons, have your food before entering the canyons and make sure to carry a water bottle with you.

Amar Ramesh is an emerging photographer from Redmond WA, USA. Photography, to him is a passion with infinite opportunities and he loves to share the lessons and tips that he learned with others. Please visit his Facebook Page for more. He is also in Flickr | Twitter | Portfolio.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

10 Quick tips for Photographing Antelope Canyons

Prizmo for Mac [Review]

This review is all about using a digital camera for a purpose it was never intended for.

Since taking on a new Mac with Snow Leopard operating system I sadly found that my marvellous image/text scanner does not work due to a lack of a suitable driver.

Now, since taking on Prizmo for Mac I can scan documents as well as perform OCR to file away the editable texts.

Then I found other but possibly less useful functions tucked away in Prizmo: curvature and perspective correction.

Let’s start with the OCR function. I made three handheld shots with my trusty Sony compact digicam, saved as JPEGs: one of a photocopied magazine article; a page from an early book of comic poetry; and finally, a page of tightly packed from a book of mine on collectable cameras.

The photocopy image was imported into Prizmo. First task was to locate the grid corners, the area in which the desired text was located; so I tapped the button Full Grid … this can square up an image that may be off level.

At this point I tapped the OCR button; by moving the cursor across the page I could preview the recognised text; following this I saved the OCR scan and could do this as a PDF file or as rich text or regular text.

If you’re running the demo version you can assess Prizmo’s capabilities in OCR and view its ability to recognise text — but the demo does not let you save it. Natch!

The result was that I had a text file that was 99 per cent perfect, falling down only where there were line breaks. Spelling? 100 per cent correct!

You may need to work with pages that are less than white in colour or ones that have text in colour. The app’s controls allow you to correct brightness and contrast in the document image or even to reduce its bit depth.

Now to the books

The comic poetry book image showed some curvature from the book not being photographed completely flat. No probs! Any bends were corrected in Prizmo.

The other book page was a bit more challenging but, by squaring it up and adjusting brightness I managed to make an OCR scan that gave me 99 per cent correct, readable text.

Curves etc

The app is handy for squaring up images but frankly is little better than Photoshop’s tools. But if you ain’t got Photoshop….

Comment

I found that correcting the squareness was the main element in achieving successful OCR.

The app is a little erratic in its behaviour: sometimes an image would load upside down and then, on occasions, the preview would appear upside down or sideways on the preview screen.

To assess its OCR talents I ran the text images through a dedicated OCR Program — ABBYY FineReader 5 Sprint Plus — and found that on most images Prizmo performed better. Nuff said!

System: PowerPC or Intel Mac with OSX 10.5.8 Leopard or later.
Get it at www.creaceed.com/prizmo/

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

Prizmo for Mac [Review]

Professional Fashion Photo Results with an iPhone 3gs

Have you ever felt that your digital camera is holding you back and that if only you could afford to buy the latest and greatest DSLR that your images would get that ‘Pro’ look that everyone strives for?

If you feel that way – you’re not alone. I hear those types of comments all the time. If that’s you – the following video is one you need to view. It’s about trying to get great results – shooting with…. an iPhone 3Gs.

The video is from the team at fstoppers. It’s creator, Lee Morris, explains:

“I created this video to simply show that you should not be limited by your camera. Obviously there was a lot that went into this shoot including a professional model, hair and makeup, a studio, lighting, and a retoucher. We may create another video in the future where we shoot with only natural light but this video is simply about the camera. There are so many photographers who are obsessed with noise, sharpness, color, dynamic range, megapixels, chromatic aberration, moire, distortion, etc. So many photographers get wrapped up in the technical side that they forget how to take compelling images. This video is for them.”

Check out some of the images taken in this photo shoot here (both edited in photoshop and unedited versions).
Yes – the images were taken with pro lighting in a great studio, with a great model who was professionally made up… and the images were photoshopped – but so are most pro shots taken with a top end DSLR. Food for thought!

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

Professional Fashion Photo Results with an iPhone 3gs

Behind the Lens: 5 Short Documentaries with Aussie Press Photographers

If you have a spare 20 minutes today (even if it is spread over the whole day) and you’re looking for a little inspiration and motivation in your photography – check out this resource by Aussie paper Sydney Morning Herald.

It is a series of 5 short documentaries where 5 Australian photographers from SMH share some of what they love about photography – and show off some of their images. The photographers are all photo journalists so they’re coming at it from that angle but they all have different spins on things and focus upon different types of subjects (news, sport, politics, natural disasters etc).

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

Behind the Lens: 5 Short Documentaries with Aussie Press Photographers

5 Tips for Photographing Houses

A Guest post by Joseph Osborn from Online Photo Resource.

Most of us don’t drive through neighborhoods looking for houses to photograph because, let’s face it, houses can be pretty boring. But from time to time we have a good reason to capture a particular house. It might be a childhood home we want to remember or a current home we are trying to sell. Regardless, when the time comes, you may find out that making a house look good can be a challenge. Here are five tips to get you headed in the right direction.

Tidy Up 

This may seem obvious, but mowing the grass and cleaning the weeds out of the gutters will make a house look a lot better. A few minutes with a broom can save you from an hour with Photoshop’s stamp tool.

Pick an Angle

Shooting from an angle rather than straight on gives the house dimension and character. It also gives you at least two choices of what to include in the background, so pick the angle that is flattering to the house and provides the best backdrop.

Watch the Weather

Shooting on a cloudy day will give you the best lighting for a house. The light will be even and diffused so you won’t have harsh shadows to deal with. 

Balance the Light

To make a house look cozy and inviting, there is nothing more important than balancing the light from the windows with the light outside. The key to achieving this balance is picking the right time of day. Even with all the lights blazing inside, nobody will notice them in the middle of the day. But as the sun sets, there will be a window of time when the exterior of the house can be properly exposed while the interior appears to glow with warmth (thanks to man-made lighting.) This may only last for ten minutes, so make sure everything is in place in advance.

Shoot in Raw

Because of the challenge of balancing natural light outside with electric light from the windows, this is a great time to use your camera’s RAW setting. With your RAW converter you can tweak the balance between the lighting and adjust the white balance to emphasize the warmth.

Compare the picture above to this one to see the difference twenty minutes and a different perspective can make.

Don’t wait to long. This next picture was taken eight minutes after the first and it’s already too dark outside.

See more tips from Joseph Osborn at Online Photo Resource.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

5 Tips for Photographing Houses

An Introduction to Focus Stacking

A guest post by Chen Wei Li from www.bythewei.com.

After weeks of preparation, i finally set out to the Singapore Botanical Gardens to nail the shot above using the technique called focus stacking.

Focus stacking is a technique used to increase depth of field in a shot with post production. This works especially well for shots using long lens and in this case, a macro lens. Let’s go back to some photography 101 here. There are three factors that will affect depth of field or ‘bokeh’:

1. Focal length. Essentially the longer your lens, the more shallow your depth of field is.

2. Distance to subject. The nearer you are to your subject, the shallower your depth of field is and it very much applies to macro lens.

3. Aperture settings. The more you open up the aperture of your lens, the resulting image has a shallower depth of field. This, however, does not matter as much where the photo above is concerned.

I am happy to say that the experiment above has been a great success!

A little more background story.

It all began on 15 May 2010, when i was making my usual walk around the Singapore Botanical Gardens to take photos. I spotted this interesting looking cactus and ran a few shots at it. When i came home and uploaded the photos, below what was i got:

I’m pretty pleased with the composition and stuff. But i hated the shallow depth of field and the resulting ‘bokeh’. Some might argue it helps to lead viewers eye to the core but i believe the cactus lines have done enough a job in that department (Go find out more on leading lines for composition if you are not sure what i am talking about). I wanted other parts of the photoraph to be focused as well.

I told myself surely i had to come back again to work on the same shot… But how?

Thankfully, i remembered a friend of mine who once mentioned the use of focus stacking for food photography.

So exactly how does focus stacking work you may ask. Well, focus stacking simply means taking multiple photos of the same subject, each with a different focused spot. This is followed by the use post-processing software like Adobe Photoshop CS4 to align the focused portion of each image into one final-and-focused image. It is a really simple technique that everyone can use on their photos.

In the mean time, here’s what I needed:

1. A very very very very steady tripod. I’m not referring to those free tripods that comes with your DSLR purchase. Technically it works but i can bet a million bucks these tripods will give you hell before anything else. In my case i used a Manfrotto 055XPROB and Manfrotto 410 junior gear head. Both are, in my honest opinion, a very hardcore combination in terms of stability, durability and precision.

2. A macro lens. To achieve my desired composition, i had to go really close. This means that even if i am shooting at f/8, the depth of field remains shallow. Not to say that other lens won’t work but you probably will have to crop the shot and risk losing overall image quality. In my case, I was using a Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 compact macro paired with a LED ring light (not particularly useful on a sunny day though)

3. Super precision matt focusing screen for manual focusing. Locking your camera on a tripod means you cannot move the camera (duh) and rely on your in-camera focus points to focus different parts of the image. Here, i used a Canon Es-S focusing screen and paired it with my 5D Classic. Awesome screen for manual focusing may i add.

4. A lot of patience. I spent no less than 30 minutes under the sun (where the cactus was conveniently situated at the time of the day) just to get the composition, the tripod positioning and lighting right.

5. Last but not least, you need a proper post processing software to handle focus stacking. Thankfully, Adobe CS4 has that feature

Ok moving on to the shooting part of focus stacking. The shot you see about actually consist of four different shots aligned and merged into one single shot, thanks to Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Now let’s look at the four photos, notice how each of them is focusing at a different spot:

Hopefully by now, you get the drift. Basically i’m taking the focused part of each photo and merging into one sharp and focus shot.

Now with the four photos, here’s what you need to do with CS4:

1. Create one file with all four layers stacked on each of in a linear arrangement. This means that you SHOULD NOT jumble up the sequence of focused image.
2. Select all four layers, go to Edit>Auto align layers.
3. Once the layers are aligned, go to Edit>Auto blend layers.
4. Let’s the software run some processing and you will get an image with the sides slightly out of focused. This is caused by auto-alignment and auto-blending.
5. Crop the image to get rid of the out of focused areas.

See! It’s that simple.

Do go out and have some fun with focus stacking. Remember, a sturdy tripod really helps to make life easier here

PS: I stumbled upon this online discussion where people are calling focusing stacking the new HDR. Technically, they are right. HDR requires taking several bracketed shots and merged them into one shot while focus stacking required several (and differently) focused shots of the same subject and merge into one. Some of them also correctly pointed out that people are going overuse this technique just like HDR. Well, let’s just leave this topic for another day shall we?

About the Author: Chen Wei Li is a freelance photographer based in Singapore and is nominated for the Top Photography Blogger in Singapore Award. His portfolio can be viewed at www.bythewei.com. He can also be found on Twitter as @bythewei

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

An Introduction to Focus Stacking