Lavatera with ‘Stacked Focus’

Taking macro photos of flower blossoms is a great way to show fine detail and beautiful forms.  One of the challenges is to get the entire image in focus.  Often the front or back of the flower is not tack sharp because of the shallow depth of field when taking close ups.

To get around this with digital photography,  there is photo editing software such as PhotoShop that can merge a number of images of the same subject and create a single image where all of it is in focus.  This is referred to as ‘stacked focusing’.  Today I tried this out.

With the camera on a tripod, and in manual mode so that the exposures would be the same, I took six shots of this lavatera blossom.  In the first image I made sure the front edge of the bloom was in focus.  The back of the bloom is very much out of focus.

I kept moving the focus ring at slight increments, taking another photo each time, as each part of the bloom was in sharp focus.  In the 6th photo the back of the bloom is in focus and the front is blurry.

I then loaded all six images into PhotoShop, aligned them and merged them, and presto!

Here it is, the whole image in focus.  Love it when stuff works!