Tuesday, March 13, 2018

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.




9 comments:

Marie Smith said...

The last shot is my favourite.

Tabor said...

I really need t do more math insteadof shooting from the hip!

PipeTobacco said...

Thank you for visiting my blog again!!! I appreciate the support with my pipe struggles. I really also enjoy macro photography! Your images are beautiful.

Country Gal said...

Nicely done all looks great . Hubs and I used to do all this kind of stuff with our photos on Photoshop when we did our photos for our selves and for our clients when we had our little photography business a few years ago , hubs also got into ghosting photos as well with Photoshop . Glad your enjoying your new lens and experimenting with it . Thanks for sharing , have a good day !

Shammickite said...

Very nice.... you are getting quite clever with all that new photoing equipment.

Joanne Noragon said...

And you bring back my old days of enthusiasm.I even built a dark room and owned two printing set ups. First black and white, then color. No Photoshop in those days; it was all chemicals and burn and dodge. But, I recognize what you're doing and it is nice.

Mage said...

I too just turn it on and shoot. PS: I do like it with the white best.

Mara said...

Love the top photo, but would prefer the white/cream background to the pink one.

Jenn Jilks said...

You go for quality. Me, quantity!!! Lovely treatments.