Squeezing the Aperture

As I suspected I would, I did a few more hyacinth macros after I made the previous post. (Maybe I'm too self-centred because there were 4 I's in that little sentence.  :)

I wanted to get the two blooms in focus plus the buds at the top. But with depth of field (DoF) being very small with macro shots, I decided to squeeze the aperture down to f32. For those who don't speak photoglese, that's a very tiny opening.

That small aperture meant that the shutter had to stay open longer. In this case it was 5 seconds, which didn't matter because I was indoors on a tripod, and all was calm.

I had put white cardboard behind the plant to remove any background distractions, but later wondered if I could replace it in photoshop. And I did just that.

I have one more to show you before they cart either me or my lens or both of us away. In this one I wanted to look down to the buds and catch some petals below. But I wanted the petals to be way out of focus.

So I took two shots. In both cases, I focussed on the buds, but the first one was at a fairly small aperture, so they looked pretty much in focus. The problem was that the petals were too distinct for the effect that I was trying to achieve. So, I opened the aperture as wide as I could (f2.8) which blurred the petals nicely.

Using layer masks, I then combined to two photos in photoshop, keeping the buds from the one photo and the background from the other. The result was at least somewhat close to that I had in mind.