Sunday, 8 November 2020

2019 -2020. A settled approach to botanical subjects

 It is over 18 months since the previous entry. Much has happened since then, the most important of course being Coronavirus and all the implications of that. Since my wife and I are in the "vulnerable persons" category we have not been off our property in 8 months apart from a couple of visits to the doctor and dentist. My photography since March 2020 has been solely what I could find in our garden.

Prior to Coronavirus, in Spring 2019, I did an exercise (written up here) comparing single-image captures with focus-stacked images for botanical subjects to help me get a better balance between the two methods. Since then I have been using both methods. Sometimes it is too breezy for stacking to work, and sometimes it is obvious that only stacking will work for a particular subject, so in either case I use just one of the methods. Very often though I use both methods and choose which method's images I like best for each individual subject.

I have simplified my processing for focus stacks and now have a workflow that is fairly fast and efficient. Stacks can consume huge amounts of time. To avoid that, when stacks become difficult I simply move on to another subject.

Here are some examples. I picked these without regard to whether they were stacks or single-capture images. As it turns out half of them are focus stacked (from 6K video) and half are single-capture images. this is a fair reflection of how I have been using the two methods. The first eight used a Panasonic G9 with Olympus 60mm macro, the last but one used a Panasonic G80 with Olympus 60mm macro and the last one used a Panasonic TZ90 pocket superzoom. 


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