Focus stacking 100 images

Uncle buck

Uncle buck

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Been playing around with a bit of macro photography using and stacking rail. After several failed attempts finally came up with this one of a Common Tiger Beetle from Madagascar.

It consists of 104 images stacked in Helicon remote and Focus. Light seems to play a huge part in this type of photography and if it is not right the images just don't seem to work

CTB5.jpg
 
Looks good, lots of detail.
I thought I was doing well this morning with my 26 image stack, you've put me to shame :(
 
In the real world (any yes, I know Macro's a different world altogether!!!), how much different is a 100 image stack from a 25?
 
Nod said:
In the real world (any yes, I know Macro's a different world altogether!!!), how much different is a 100 image stack from a 25?
Click to expand...

I don't know the complete technical information for it but my take on it is when shooting a 2.8 at 5x magnification the DoF is miniscule so stacking more images means focus is not missed across the distance required to cover front to back of the subject. hope that makes sense
 
I understand the DoF issues, I'm just wondering how much difference there is between the 2 options.
 
Yes, I know that that will give a small slice of DoF but if the 50 images in the stack are spread across the whole required DoF, how big is the visible difference?
 
Nod said:
Yes, I know that that will give a small slice of DoF but if the 50 images in the stack are spread across the whole required DoF, how big is the visible difference?
Click to expand...

It depends on the aperture. If the aperture is small enough to give sufficient depth of field for each image without leaving gaps between the images and with sufficient overlap between images for the stacking software to be able to work out where the joins are between images , then presumably using fewer images with more space between them would not make much or perhaps any difference. If you have to decrease the aperture in order to achieve that then of course you may lose sharpness/detail depending on where the original aperture and the new aperture sit in relation to the sweet spot aperture (or you might even gain detail if for example the original aperture was wide open and closing it somewhat moved it nearer to the sweet spot aperture).

Those considerations apply to focus bracketing, whether done by the camera, done manually or done on a rig. As it happens it does not apply to that droplet example because that was captured as a video and the camera was in control of how quickly to move the focus and hence the gap between successive images. With smaller apertures the video goes from front to back quicker and you get fewer frames.
 
Thanks for the answer, Nick.
 
Uncle buck said:
Been playing around with a bit of macro photography using and stacking rail. After several failed attempts finally came up with this one of a Common Tiger Beetle from Madagascar.

It consists of 104 images stacked in Helicon remote and Focus. Light seems to play a huge part in this type of photography and if it is not right the images just don't seem to work

View attachment 234996
Click to expand...


This is such a fascinating shot, you could be mistaken for believing it to be CGI because of the light and detail.
 
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