They also have their limitations: there are no zoom tilt-shifts, so you can only use certain focal lengths, and they don’t help with situations where the near and far objects aren’t on the same plane, like tree branches in front of other tree branches. But I’ve never gone that route, mainly because tilt-shift lenses are quite expensive. With a tilt-shift lens you can change the plane of focus to match the receding plane of a field of flowers, making it easier to get everything in focus. One solution to this problem is tilt-shift lenses. And I’m more reluctant to use very small apertures like f/22 because the softness caused by diffraction at these small apertures also becomes more apparent with high-resolution sensors. A slight fall-off in depth of field that wasn’t very noticeable with a 16- or 20-megapixel camera becomes glaringly obvious with a 36- or 42-megapixel camera. Using high-resolution cameras the last couple of years has only made it more difficult to get everything in focus. Again I used focus stacking for this image. Poppies and lupines in dapples light, Merced River Canyon. But even with wide-angle lenses it’s sometimes difficult to get everything in focus with one frame, because I’m getting really close to the foreground flowers, so there’s a tremendous amount of depth. Even with careful focusing and f/22 it’s impossible to get everything in focus with a long lens raking across a field of flowers like that. I’m frequently picking out a particularly dense patch of flowers, and using a telephoto lens to emphasize patterns and visually compress the space, making the flowers look closer together. It’s just difficult to get everything in focus with one frame when photographing wildflowers. I don’t need focus stacking often in other seasons, but in spring I use this technique all the time. And this is very common for me when photographing wildflowers. I’ve included a couple of my favorite images from that day here.Īs I was processing the images later, it occurred to me that all of them required focus stacking. Claudia and I spent the afternoon up there on Wednesday, and had a great time. No big swaths of poppies, but smaller patches, and some of those patches are mixed with other flowers, which always makes things more interesting. There’s been a secondary poppy bloom in the eastern end of the Merced River Canyon near El Portal. It’s spring, which means it’s wildflower season, and focus-stacking season. A focus-stacked blend of four different frames. Poppies, lupines, goldfields, and tri-colored gilia, Merced River Canyon, Wednesday afternoon.
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