If you shoot in aperture priority mode, the shutter speed might be different between shots, possibly increasing it beyond what your subject will tolerate. That of course only if you shoot in manual mode, which I would recommend. If you have a cloudy day and it transforms between being sunny and, well, less sunny, the software has to handle different exposed images besides the different focus planes. That is not always possible, we come to that in a second. Best would be to only change the focus plane. Keep the changes between each image to a minimum. Basically, you need as much as possible equal conditions for each shot in the series. Some complications you might experience when doing a focus stack are lighting and subject movement. There are several things you need to control to have a successful focus stack that ties in with the common pitfalls, so I’ll cover both in this paragraph. ![]() When is a good opportunity to do it, and when should you avoid focus stacking? Here are the two front and back images, I spare you all the 22 images in between: Instead, I took a series of images, moving the focus (by using the focus ring of the lens, more on that later) a bit between each image to cover the legs at the front, right up to the legs at the back. I could have increased ISO to get to a smaller aperture without increasing the shutter speed, but that would have introduced noise I wanted to avoid. You also get a problem with decreased image sharpness caused by diffraction, so just using a smaller aperture is not always the solution. But I found that going to f/22 would increase the shutter speed to several seconds, and even with my patient subject, it was still moving a little bit and the result was not very sharp. So to get a greater depth of field, I have to decrease the aperture (make the hole smaller, bigger f/number). But I am already at f/8 and 0.4 seconds. You can see that not everything is in acceptable focus, only a small slice is sharp (enough), the stuff inside the green marked area. ![]() This is just one example image of the series. Wasn’t moving much, so I could go back to get my camera, set up my tripod and shoot a series of images intending to post-process them with focus stacking. This is an image of a very coöperative moth sitting on our house wall. When is an excellent opportunity to do it?.If you are in a camera club and entered macro images into a competition, and the judge said something like “Nice subject, but the is not in focus, try some focus stacking next time!”, then I can help you with that. Most subjects will not fit into an acceptable depth of field to be sharp in all the right places. I am talking about millimeters or even less. ![]() One annoying side effect of macro photography is the very (very!) shallow depth of field. I assume you have a good macro lens or closeup filter or anything to get you close to your subjects. My guess is that you already know that if you read an article about focus stacking, so I won’t dig into what macro photography is and what you need. Great macro opportunities are everywhere. No need to pay for a trip to Iceland or Paris or New York. When you are doing macro photography, the benefit is you can find heaps of subjects in your garden (if you have one) or around where you live.
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