04/01/2019
For the two photographs I plundered a bouquet of flowers and took out a eryngo and yellow peruvian lilies, both are tabletop pictures which I illuminated with two continuous lights in front of a dark blue background. Macro shots offer the possibility to show small details, which you would otherwise hardly notice, in a big way. This can be seen particularly clearly in the fine structures of the eryngo.
With macro photos, one very quickly has the problem that the depth of field is too limited to show the entire object in sharp focus. Even if you close the aperture very strongly, in many cases it is not enough and unfortunately one also quickly gets problems with the diffraction blur that reduces the image quality again. A good but somewhat complex solution is a technique called focus stacking. This involves taking a series of pictures in which the focus is slightly shifted from frame to frame until a sharp image is taken of every part of the object. Then the single images have to be combined. I used the software Helicon Focus for this. But it also works with Photo Merge as part of Photoshop, if you don't have to process too many single images. Very helpful is the use of a special focusing rack and also a stable tripod is indispensable.
For both photos I took 60 single shots each. It was important to me that the background remained blurred. This often looks better than when everything is sharp from front to back.
Yellow peruvian lilie (Alstroemeria)
Eryngo (Eryngium)
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