Allium focus stack - 5D and M3

[John Liddle]

Our onions in the veggie plot did not do at all well this year, but when I lifted them this morning, one had gone to flower.

Allium flower heads are rather lovely so I decided to take a focus stack with the 5D. As an experiment I also tried with the M3. Both came out reasonably well I think.


5D version
Allium focus stack (5D) by John Liddle, on Flickr

M3 version
Allium focus stack (M3) by John Liddle, on Flickr

[tesarver]

Re: Allium focus stack - 5D and M3

Nicely done John

Tom

[ColytonJohn]

Re: Allium focus stack - 5D and M3

Both nice and sharp John How many images in the stack?

Cheers,
John

[Stan]

Re: Allium focus stack - 5D and M3

Agree both have worked well

Stan

[Tigger]

Re: Allium focus stack - 5D and M3

nice work, its something I've never tried

[John Liddle]

Re: Allium focus stack - 5D and M3

Tom, John, Stan & Ian - thank you all for looking and for your encouragement.

How many images in the stack?

Cheers,
John

John - there were 15 in the 5D version and 9 in the M3 version.

With the 5D, I used my right angle finder at 2.5X magnification and having balanced the camera on a convenient brick, focused on the nearest part of the flower and then just nudged the focus ring a tiny bit at a time until I thought the focus point had gone past the far point of the flower. If I had taken the time to compute the DOF, I could probably have achieved the same result in fewer shots.

For the M3, I just looked at the live view screen and moved the focus "area" box around until I thought I had covered all of the visible area of the flower. Again, a bit of computation beforehand might well have enabled fewer shots.

However, although fewer shots might have been possible, I did note that for both versions all of the layer masks used to select the in focus portions showed at least one bit of white, so they all made some contribution to the final outcome.