A female Comanche Skimmer dragonfly (Libellula comanche) seen at Nutty Brown Farm, Austin on Saturday, August 26th, 2026. One of the techniques I’ve been playing with recently is focus bracketing and stacking. With focus bracketing enabled, the camera takes a sequence of images and slowly moves the focal point between each. I can then take those exposures and use Photoshop to align and blend them to generate a final image that has more of the dragonfly in focus than would be possible with a single shot. It sounds straightforward but the fact that the wind is moving things around and the dragonfly is also moving slightly between each exposure adds to the fun. This particular image was generated using 8 frames and represents the Photoshop output with no significant tweaking. I see a few blending artifacts now that I look closely so, in future, I’ll have to remember to touch up the masks Photoshop creates!
For the technically inclined...