Closer Still

I had yet another go at macros with my polka dot plant. This had a slightly different twist. I plucked a tip which I have done before, but I set it up in front of the rest of the plant, which I hadn't done previously.

I used the flash and took 8 photos, each with a different focal point, which I later stacked together into one image in Photoshop.

This ↓ is the result, or at least my first result.

This is the setup ↓ in the next photo. The portion of the plant that I photographed was only about 1cm or about 0.4in. The part of the plant that made it into the final image above is within the red square, or approximately so.

I was happy with the result in the top photo until I realized that I had lost most of the pinkish background of the rest of the plant although you can see a little magenta toward the bottom left.

So, I decided to reprocess the image from scratch to try to get more of that out-of-focus background bokeh*. I also decided to crop it differently, leaving negative space to the left.

To repeat: I do like the first photo but the background of the second was more what I had in mind originally.

Oh, I should have said that I used my crop sensor camera to get a little closer than is possible with my full frame camera, and I also used an extension tube to get closer still.

(I do know that many of the things that I describe must seem foreign to most of you, but it's here for my record and also for perhaps a few others. Also, see a definition of bokeh, below.)

*Wikipedia
In photography, bokeh (/ˈboʊkeɪ/ BOH-kay;[1] Japanese: [boke]) is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in the out-of-focus parts of an image produced by a lens.[2][3][4] Bokeh has been defined as "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light".[5] Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting ("good" and "bad" bokeh, respectively).[6] Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.