Category: art

Focus Stacking for Fun and Profit

I’ve been playing with focus stacking because it can result in spectacular results.

The sharpness and three dimensionality of this image are a combination of using a telephoto lens for a flat perspective and focus stacking to generate the depth of focus. 

It can also fail spectacularly.

and

There are a couple of simple ways to fail:

  • Move the camera. Ideally, you would use a tripod, but I can usually hold the camera still enough. Especially if I lie on the ground and brace like I was doing target shooting. 
  • Use too few focus layers. Nothing like having blurry stuff in the middle.
  • Let the subject move. Windy days are heck with flowers. 
  • Align Jpegs rather that raw images. Jpeg images will vary in their color normalization and will generate odd color patches in the output. You can spend some time blending those by hand, or you can use the raw data which should have constant normalization. 

It works surprisingly well when you get it right. I’m looking forward to trying this with landscape photography. The allure of a sharp, sharp foreground and background is hard to pass up.

For more of my work please see www.robertharrisonfineart.com

Spider Web Rainbow

The droplets on this web are neat – both because they make the web visible and because they are colored. The colors are from the reflected light and formed in much the same way as those of a rainbow. Neat?

Artwork of the week 1/6/23

One of the big differences between “just snapshots” and art photography is that the artist thinks about what they’re doing, what they’re trying to show, and how to achieve the desired result. 

I’ve been reading and studying techniques of composition because … well … that’s one way to learn. The other is way is to go out and shoot, I’ve been doing that as well, and I’m hoping to have meaningful interactions with some of the local photography groups. (We’ll see about that last part, I tried before with one group and had a less than stellar experience. Cliques and in-groups are a thing.)

One book I’ve found useful is Richard Garvey-Williams “mastering composition”   It’s inspired me to look again at how I edit images. You can’t always plan out photographs in the wild. You can try, but nature has a way of doing what she wants and the process of observation often perturbs the environment. Shades of quantum mechanics, say what? 

Today’s images show what I mean.  (and they are or soon will be available on this site.)

The original is pretty, enough, but it’s out of balance and a bit washed out.

Cropping, playing with the image chromatic values (adjusting the image values to remove saturation and then adjusting the midpoint level), and using various trickery to restore the size results in:

This is a vastly better image. The subject dominates the picture and the lines defined by the flowers leads the eyes to it.

Much the same happens with this image of a Swallowtail. Before:

and after:

Art, my art

I’ve been a bit remiss at posting. Literature … well almost literature, and a malicious review or two sort of got in the way.

But so did another interest – visual art. Mostly photography but I’m also developing my skill at painting and drawing.

I’ve also started a small business selling my art. Some will be on fine art America animal art prints and my main page. I’m also using zenfolio (for studio work) and art store fronts.