Most years almost all of my photos are close-up/macros, mainly in our garden with occasional trips to local nature reserves. This year all of them were close-up/macros. I didn't get to any of the nature reserves, so it was mainly in our garden, or at the end of the year in a very small patch of woodland next to the church opposite our house, which I had not previously sought permission to go into.
This was the year when focus-stacking from 6K video fully settled into my "toolkit" as a routine method to use with flowers, buds, berries, seed pods etc using natural light, hand-held. I used it most of the time apart from when it was particularly breezy. Here are three of them.
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#1 A stack of 78 6K video frames
#2 A stack of 189 6K video frames
#3 A stack of 39 6K video frames
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I used a second hand-held, natural light technique for flowers etc - aperture bracketing. This gives me 7 shots from f/2.8 to f/22 for a single press of the shutter button. Having a set of images at different apertures lets me choose the one (or occasionally more than one) where I best like the balance between the amount of the subject that is in focus and the way the background looks. In very breezy conditions this would be the only technique I would use, with focus stacking being impractical. Otherwise I would use both video (for focus stacking) and aperture bracketing. Using both techniques several times for each subject meant that if none of the stacks worked I might still have something to work with from the aperture bracket sets. And sometimes I just prefer the look of single stills, or sometimes I only feel like shooting stills (and sometimes only videos), and for some subjects I have learnt that stacking is highly unlikely to work and so I often don't bother with video for those subjects any more.
Here are three stills that were taken from aperture bracket sets.
#4 I chose the maximum aperture f/2.8 shot for this one.
#5 I chose f/11 for this one. That was probably the first one in the sequence where I felt enough of the subject was sufficiently in focus for my purposes, probably referring to the yellow "fur" on the right hand petal, and that left the background better defined (more intrusive) than in the previous one. I know that many people much prefer plain backgrounds, and will for example use use plain cards behind the subject or use background replacement in post processing to produce plain backgrounds, but I'm happy with quite busy backgrounds if to my eye they complement the subject or at least don't fight too hard against it (a matter of personal visual preference of course). In fact I like the variety that less defocused backgrounds can produce. I find the relatively plain backgrounds I get from stacks a bit monotonous sometimes.
#6 And sometimes a smaller aperture is needed to get enough of the subject into focus to suit my visual preferences, which lean towards getting the whole subject in focus where practical. As well as involving a trade-off as to the look of the background, using smaller apertures can involve trade-offs involving shutter speed and ISO. I have that side of it automated now, so the camera uses base ISO as long as the shutter speed is 1/80 sec or faster (as for #4 above), and then hold the shutter speed at 1/80 sec as it increases ISO up to a maximum of ISO 3200 (as for #5 and #6), at which point (which I don't reach very often) it holds the ISO at 3200 and slows the shutter speed.
The third technique I used this year was entirely new (for me) and used with a combination of kit I had not used before, for photographing invertebrates down to 1mm or so long, hand-held, often as they move around, using single stills with flash. This involves the use of very small apertures to produce a lot greater depth of field than you normally get with single images, especially for small subjects (up to 8 times bigger than the largest depth of field I had previously been able to get). Such small apertures produce extremely soft images which need strong post processing to produce results that are usable for my purposes (which is another matter of personal preference and judgement of course).
I started experimenting with this technique in the summer and by the end of the year I had found a combination of kit I was comfortable using, which involved a 2X magnification macro lens and two 2X teleconverters to give a total maximum magnification of 8X and which let me set f-numbers up to f/90. By the end of the year I had settled on setting the f-number to around f/45 most of the time, which taking account of the magnifications I was using gave me effective f-numbers up to around f/400. And by the end of the year I had sorted out post processing to use on these extremely soft images.
#7 One of the things the extra depth of field helped me do was to get shots of highly active insects and spiders which didn't stay in one place for long and sometimes didn't stay still when they did stay in more or less the same place for a while. This first example is of modestly sized wasp which was in one place for a relatively long time as it tried to pull flesh off of a pigeon corpse, but by the end of the year I was photographing much smaller animals in the 1 to 2mm size range as they moved around.
#8 I also found that I could get much closer in on some of my favourite subjects than I had been able to previously, like this snail.
#9 And I had much more success with small subjects in the 1-2mm size range, like this springtail.
#10 And finally, something entirely unexpected turned up at the end of the year. It turned out that I could use the hand-held, flash-based, small aperture, large depth of field approach for water droplets like these.
It has been a horrible year in so many ways for so many people. Isolated in our own little world with my wife it turned out to have some significantly positive aspects as far as my photography goes, for which I am extremely grateful.
