We found this beautiful green beetle (I believe it’s a Rose Chafer) on our front step so couldn’t resist but get out the camera gear to try to capture him. Ushered him onto a leaf to get him inside then placed on a shiny sheet of black acrylic I have especially of these kinds of shoots.
Got the Sony A9, Sony 90mm macro and a small LED modelling light (Vijim VL100C) and started to shoot away. The plan was to take a series of pics and focus stack for a sharp image of the face and reflection, so put the camera in manual focus, manual exposure and and high speed shooting mode (20 frames per second) to grab all the necessary photos. Exposure was set to 1/100s to avoid any motion blur of my movements, f5.6 for balance of depth of field and sharpness per shot and ISO1600 (as needed by the combination of the LED lamp, shutter speed and aperture).
I started slightly out out of focus (too far away), held the shutter down and slowly leant forward, getting 47 images. The first few had nothing in focus so discarded those. The last 20 or so had too much of the rear of the beetle in focus and decided to skip those to so in the end about 16 images for stacking.
Exported the 16 ARW images as DNG from CaptureOne to HeliconFocus then used Method C (pyramid) setting with smoothing set to 4 and rendered. Then comes the hard bit of the retouching inside HeliconFocus. Even at 20 frames per second, the beetle moved quite a bit over those 8/10ths of second (16 images), so need to select the right parts from each frame quite carefully to avoid ghosting (where the same part of the beetle appears in two seperate parts of the image due to its movement).
This was the end result. I’ve a few more to share but this is my favourite. Oh and the red in the foreground reflection is my Coke Zero can I forgot to move, but I quite like the accidental accent it adds!
Got the Sony A9, Sony 90mm macro and a small LED modelling light (Vijim VL100C) and started to shoot away. The plan was to take a series of pics and focus stack for a sharp image of the face and reflection, so put the camera in manual focus, manual exposure and and high speed shooting mode (20 frames per second) to grab all the necessary photos. Exposure was set to 1/100s to avoid any motion blur of my movements, f5.6 for balance of depth of field and sharpness per shot and ISO1600 (as needed by the combination of the LED lamp, shutter speed and aperture).
I started slightly out out of focus (too far away), held the shutter down and slowly leant forward, getting 47 images. The first few had nothing in focus so discarded those. The last 20 or so had too much of the rear of the beetle in focus and decided to skip those to so in the end about 16 images for stacking.
Exported the 16 ARW images as DNG from CaptureOne to HeliconFocus then used Method C (pyramid) setting with smoothing set to 4 and rendered. Then comes the hard bit of the retouching inside HeliconFocus. Even at 20 frames per second, the beetle moved quite a bit over those 8/10ths of second (16 images), so need to select the right parts from each frame quite carefully to avoid ghosting (where the same part of the beetle appears in two seperate parts of the image due to its movement).
This was the end result. I’ve a few more to share but this is my favourite. Oh and the red in the foreground reflection is my Coke Zero can I forgot to move, but I quite like the accidental accent it adds!
