12:53 AM
Played with focus stacking in Magic Lantern on my Canon for the first time. Not my best photo but posting so I can share how useful this tool is. Subject is a bunch of flowers I had to get my wife after I did something I shouldn't have. That plus 2 boxes of chocolates got me back into the green :-)
So what is focus stacking you may ask?
Well, when you take closeup photos of subjects like flowers and insects your camera has a very shallow depth of view. The higher the magnification the less foreground and background you will have in focus. I've shot many photos where my depth of field is no more than 1-2mm! Sometimes this is desirable but more than most not. The lilly below would have had some of the background and possibly deeper bit in the inside of the flower out of focus. To rectify this I set my camera up on a tripod and took 7 photos each one 2 focus steps deeper than the one before starting from the front of the flower slowly working deeper.
Now, this would have been difficult with a manual lens but, with an autofocus lens en Magic Lantern installed on your Canon, you can let the camera do all the calculations, change the focus and take the shots for you. All that is left is to do some basic exposure and saturation editing in Lightroom, then import the photos as Layers into Photoshop. Use the Photoshop Auto Align tool and then the Auto Blend tool to stack the photos by focus point.
The end result is a close-up photo where the whole subject is fully in focus!
Canon 7D, Tamron 18-270mm f3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD, Focal length 54mm, Exposure 1/60sec at f5, ISO 1250, Focus auto, VC off, Flash external, Filter none.
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