Let's try this again, shall we?

Week 4 of my Project 52!

OK, so I admit it; I got lazy. Between work and real life, things just didn't come together the way I figured they would. After billing almost 21 work days in January and being a general couch potatoe in February, the Project 52 kinda fell by the wayside... But fear not!!! I'm back and raring to go! It's still a Project 52; I just never said it would be 52 weeks in a row.... (OK, in hindsight maybe I did but it's my Blog so I can pretty much do what I want....)

So how am I gonna solve the problem that we're now in week 7 of 2012 but I'm only going into Week 4 of the Project? Simple! I'm gonna cheat...

This week I bring you four (that's right ladies and gentlemen, FOUR!) pictures! All have a common theme but they're all different in their own ways.

Week 4, 5, 6 and 7 will now be commonly known as;

1. Macro
2. Refraction
3. Macro Flower
4. and Focus Stacking

First up we have Macro

Water Drops on Leaves

This was actually a set up shot for my second shot but I couldn't seem to get the water drops to hang down from the leaves the way I wanted them to. On the plus side, I kinda liked the way it looked so I went with it. It was a pretty simple setup; I had the branch with the leaves positioned in front of the camera and I sprayed it down with a mixture of water and sugar. The sugar was suppose to make the water drop more "sticky", not really sure if it worked or not but I definitey liked the end result.

I didn't even have any of my lights set up, I just did it with a longer exposure and about F22 (four or five seconds if my memory serves me right.)

Next was the shot I was actually going for; Refraction!

Refraction

This shot was a lot tougher than I thought it would be. Getting the reflection of the flower in the water drop proved to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I had to use a different branch because the leaves just weren't working out. I started with the branch and the drop, then I built up the background with some flowers. Getting the one yellow flower to show in the drop was tough; the depth of field was pretty small (think about 1mm...) and I had to keep moving the flower back and forth until I got it reasonably in focus.

Then I added the lights; I had one to the left shooting through a homemade diffusion panel (think an old picture frame with some white cloth stapled to it) and another to the right with a snoot pointed directly at the flower. When I took the first pic, the branch and drop were OK but the background was so dark, you couldn't see the flower. That's why I ended up adding the flashes to the mix. I still ended up shooting this at about 4 seconds to get the proper exposure all around.

Lighting Diagram

For those of you who are interested, this is what I mean by the setup for the shot. Yea, I'm no DaVinci... (Closer to a Picaso by the looks of this diagram....)

Now to move on to Week 6 (or about 15 minutes after I took the last photo, whatever works for you...)

Yes, we're talking about the straight Macro shot! By far, this was the easiest of the four shots. I set up the flower, moved the camera back a few feet and blasted it with ligth. And the end result?

Macro Flower

 I had to move the camera back further to combat the extremely narrow depth of field from the macro lens. I cropped the photo down to move the view in closer. Still, I'm pretty pleased with the resolution and sharpness of this lens! This worked because the flower was actually big enough that I could do that. But what if I wanted to shoot something really small? That's the reason I got the 90mm Macro in the first place. There has to be a solution out there somewhere...

Luckily, there is! And that brings us to our last photo; Focus Stacking!

So for those of you who know anything about photography, you know that the closer you focus, the narrower your depth of field. This is the bane of Macro Photography (well, as far as I know; I'm new at this, don'tcha know...). The 90mm lens focuses down to about 5 inches; at that distance the depth of field is measured in milimeters... not a lot of room for error.

This is what I mean:

Unstacked Image

As you can see, the pokey thing (It's a technical term, I looked it up...) in the centre of the flower is in focus; the rest... not so much. Great if you just want a picture of the pokey thing but not so great if you want the whole flower in focus (or bug, or any other really really small thing you wanna shoot). You can try to increase your depth of field by stopping down the lens (this was shot at F18) but you're not gonna gain that much at this distance. Another solution is to move the camera back thereby increasing the DOF (Sorry, I'm getting lazy and typing Depth of Field over and over is getting redundant) but in order to get the same view you'd have to crop the photo thereby losing resolution. I want my pictures sharp, Dammit!!!

The solution? Focus stacking! What you do is take several pictures at different focal points (think of it as focusing at 1mm, then 2mm, then 3mm... repeat until you've shot the whole thing) and combine them all together to (hopefully) get one fully focused picture! Genius I tell you!!!

Here's the same pic with all the other photo's I took stacked together:

Stacked Version

Big difference! I think there were a total of 20 pictures total stacked together to get this photo. If you look closely, you'll notice that the centre pit of the flower (yes, another technical term. Don't judge me...) is still not in focus, I kinda missed that when I was taking the pictures. It is a learning process after all....

Well that about does it, I'm caught up! Sure, I had to bend the rules a bit, but they're my rules and I can do what I want!

For next week, I think I might try a little landscape photography; I picked up a new set of ND Grad filters from Henry's this week and I'm dying to break them in!

Until next week people!