I’m going to stay with insect macro photographs this week because I spent a couple of hours yesterday morning in the flower field at Nutty Brown Farm and got quite a few decent images of the mini-beasts I found there.
This image shows the head of a widow skimmer dragonfly I found on one of the taller plants. I managed to get quite a few frames of it and, as usual, I shot bursts to ensure that at least one of the frames had its eye sharp. This was especially difficult yesterday due to a stiff breeze which was causing the plant it was sitting on to thrash about rather dramatically but, in the end, I got a sharp eye and moved on.
Back in Lightroom, I noticed that I had 9 frames with at least part of the insect’s head in focus. The images were nowhere near in registration (thanks to that wind) but I pulled them in to Photoshop and told it to focus stack (align the frames as best it can then blend the in-focus sections of each to give a single output image with a wider depth-of-field). To my surprise, it did a great job and this is the result.
Just for reference, here’s a single frame that forms part of the stack to give you an idea of the depth of field of each exposure. As you can see here, the closest eye isn’t quite sharp but you can see the facets of the far eye fairly clearly along with the hairs in the middle of the head.
For the technically inclined...