2012-07-01-17.07.23 ZS PMax1

Claire's garden, as any garden, is a wonderful place for photographic exploration. And I especially like her yellow Marguerites as I keep looking for another way of shooting them. Last month I shot an unopened Marguerite intentionally putting most of the flower out of focus. This time I wanted the flower totally in focus, which I did by using focus stacking. Focus stacking is a technique where a series of photos with different focal points are then combined to give an image with more in focus area than the lens would otherwise allow. Although macro lenses allow one to get in close the lenses also have very shallow depth of focus. I brought the flower inside because the wind would be shifting its position constantly plus we have a blue camp chair that I thought would be a good background. This was my very first effort at focus stacking and the image is not as sharp as I would like but I thought it came out nicely. BTW, the flower is only about an inch in diameter. Nikkor 85mm macro, f5.6, 1/2 sec, ? no. of images focused stack. I will send a 8x8 print to anyone who can guess the correct number of images combined.