I thought some of you might be interested in a recent hand-held focus-stack:
I use hand-held focus stacking quite a lot. Not always with the purpose of getting the whole of the subject in focus but often just to generally increase the depth of field to get a more pleasing image.
Normally my subjects are quite tiny (say 5mm or less) so at f/16 or f/18 it only takes 3 frames to ensure most of the subject (excl. legs) is pretty much in focus.
This spider measured approx. 8mm excluding legs so was larger than most of my previous subjects. He was keeping quite still so I decided to go for a stack. I guestimated that 6 frames should cover him (probably should have gone for 8).
Camera: Nikon D300 + Nikon 105mm Macro VR.
Settings: ISO200, manual exposure, f/18 @ 1/250s. Flash was manual pop-up at 1/4 power. Focus was manual.
I always start by focussing on the closest part of the subject and gradually, shot-by-shot move the camera closer to the subject, visually checking the critical point of focus before firing the shutter. I work pretty quickly as I find doing so helps me to select the next point of focus (if I take too long I forget where I focussed on my last shot). Also the less time you take the less chance there is that the subject will move a leg or even do a runner.
I loaded the six images together into a Photoshop 'levels stack' and manually aligned them one by one (rotate and shift) using partial transparency in levels to check alignment. The 'level stack' was cropped and then each level was saved individually with filename suffix a, b, c, d, e and f.
These six manually aligned images were then stacked in Zerene Stacker (alignment is further refined at this stage). The stacked image was then taken back into CS3 for final sharpening, cropping and resizing.
The following two pics show (a) the full image at ~30% full size and (b) the close-up, cropped image at about 60% of full size. The full size image (not shown) is 2648x2648 pixels.
Bruce
