Macro Flower Photography

We’ve all admired those awesome closeup shots of flower blossoms.  In fact, I spend a good deal of time in the garden crouched over the camera on a tripod trying to get that perfect image of a blossom with fresh raindrops.  Or, taking a macrophoto of a bloom that presents it in a different perspective, such as this one of a cosmos:



But , I would like to introduce you to a photographer who has taken macrophotography to a whole new level.

Brian Valentine, of Worthing W. Sussex, UK, uses a technique called ‘stacked focusing’ to achieve incredible detail of a flower blossom perfectly refracted in a dew drop.  Here’s an example of his work:

Photo by Brian Valentine

Thanks to digital photography, getting a shot like this is now possible with the help of stacked focusing software.  Here’s how it works, according to Brian’s tutorial on Flickr: The camera takes a series of shots with precise focusing through the depth of the object being photographed – the dewdrop, in this case.  The resulting images are then fed into the computer software program where they are ‘stacked’, and a single image is produced with the entire dewdrop in perfect focus.  And so is the image of the blossom within the dewdrop.  In the photo above you can see the out-of-focus bloom that is being refracted in the dewdrop.

For some more eye-popping images like this, visit Brian’s web site.  It’s incredible!