Stunning photo stacks

James Paterson focus-stacks a flower in several segments, then stitches them together for a super-detailed close-up

Stitch together a super-detailed close-up

One of the most appealing things about macro photography is the way it lets us see a tiny world in fantastic detail. But what if the detail straight-out-of-camera just isn’t enough? In this project, we’re going to look at how to combine two camera techniques that enable us to expand depth of field and our image’s resolution. This will result in a level of fine detail that simply wouldn’t be possible with a single frame.

Depth of field is one of the main considerations with close-up photography. When the subject is very close to the lens – as is usually the case with macro shots – the depth of field can be incredibly shallow, even when using narrower apertures. As long as our subject is stationary, we can get around this problem by shooting a focus stack.

This involves taking a series of shots while adjusting the focus point in order to capture sharpness in different parts of the subject – in this case a pink gerbera. Once done, the in-focus areas from each image can be combined to create a completely sharp image. Focus stacking can be done by hand, but for greater precision you can use software to do it for you. Here, we’ve made use of the excellent Helicon Focus and Helicon Remote. The latter allows us to incrementally shift the focus point, then we can automatically combine the set of images in Helicon Focus.

For our flower, we shot it in three segments, shifting the camera position slightly to the side in each. You do this in a similar way that you would to shooting a panoramic landscape. This effectively lets us triple the resolution of a camera’s sensor.

Each segment consists of 40 shots, so the final image you see here is made up of 120 frames! Once combined, the result is a wonderfully detail-rich close-up with a huge pixel count and front-to-back sharpness.