#711 Focus Stacking for Macro and Landscape Photography – A Recorded Lecture/Workshop

This two-hour presentation delves deep into macro photography; the techniques of photographing small objects from either a fine-art point of view or a clinical scientific point of view. This presentation covers macro photography techniques up to 20x magnifications and can even be applied to maximizing depth of field for landscape photographers.  View a demonstration of how to assemble a composite of images into one spectacular image that you could not possible get in just one shot using an editing software such as Photoshop, Helicon Focus or On-One.  Learn to fill the frame in your viewfinder with the head of a pin or the glistening facets of a fly’s eye. It is hard to imagine that the same technique can be applied to landscape photography but you can!  Learn to photograph a landscape where the foreground is six feet away, the subject is twelve feet away and the back ground is twenty or more feet away to create a photo where everything is in incredibly sharp focus well beyond what you could achieve in just one exposure. Explore the fascinating worlds of ordinary objects such as pocket watch parts or cell phone innards. We will discuss photographing diverse subjects including insects, small machines, flowers, computer chips, gemstones, coins, and postage stamps. Both the scientific and artistic aspects of macro photography will also be discussed.  Students will have ample opportunity to view each setup, learning various techniques to combat vibration, moving live subjects, using extension tubes or macro lenses to achieve perfect exposure, exposure computation and magnification computation to get unbelievable sharpness. We will discuss rare macro lenses such as Photars, Luminars, and Macro-Summars; and high quality macro photography using low cost used darkroom enlarging lenses. Helicon Focus is a program that takes control of your camera to shoot 10-20 photos or more to be combined later, using a computer, into one photo to create  depth-of-field not possible in just on shot. Learn to reverse mount your regular photographic lenses for magnifications to create magnifications up to 20x.