Critique Another Amaryllis

absolutely love this image. awesome, well done

never done focus stacking.
can the same look be achieved by increasing the Fstop. i.e increasing the depth of field?
 
absolutely love this image. awesome, well done

never done focus stacking.
can the same look be achieved by increasing the Fstop. i.e increasing the depth of field?

[Andy, my apologies if this is intrusive.]

No. If you increase the f-stop you lose fine detail because of diffraction (while gaining larger scale detail across the increased depth of field). With stacking you can use the sweet spot aperture to capture maximum fine detail, and you can get this fine detail across a deep depth of field. This comes at a cost though ......

...... With a single shot you get a gentle transition from in-focus to out of focus areas. With stacking you get a rapid transition between the in-focus and out of focus areas. That is why I asked if this was a stack, because I could see a rapid transition, most obviously running down from the top left on the left-most rear petal (and I also thought the fine detail looked very good, and looked consistent across the in-focus area, which also points to stacking).

It depends on the way the parts of the scene are arranged physically in relation to one another and in relation to the camera, but what I look for is a "gap" where I can place the in-focus/out of focus transition plane so the transition does not fall across any surface, dividing it into distinct in-focus and out of focus areas. However, with this sort of flower shot (and I suspect with almost all larger magnification invertebrate stacks, although I don't generally do those) there almost certainly isn't such a gap to exploit and the only way to avoid sharp transitions is to make the stack deep enough to cover the whole scene. This however brings its own problems. More on that if anyone is interested and, hopefully, Andy doesn't mind.
 
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GardenersHelper, Not at all ! I'm only just getting to get the hang of this macro stuff and no way there as knowledgeable as some on this forum. All comments welcome.
 
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