I feel honored and have a genuine sense of gratitude that my horizontal version of this shot has made the Arizona Highways 2014-2015 Photo Contest Finals.
With all the truly amazing work there by fabulous photographers, I was actually quite surprised. Like a lot of other people here I am sure, I grew up with this magazine always in our home. It was a favorite of my entire family. In fact I am very sure it had a real effect on me choosing a career of leading photography tours with a strong emphasis on the great SW and Arizona. I had never really thought about it until I found out I was in the running.
As they describe on the site: "A placid pool reflects a lone tree and the landscape of White Pocket in the Vermilion Cliffs"
Sony A7R
Rokinon 14mm
f/5.6
200 ISO
14 shots, focus sacked for enhanced depth of field.
I should note that I used both Photoshop CC 2014, and Zerene Stacker for the Depth of Field Focus Blend and Photoshop did the better job, so I went with that, with the typical bits of clean up here and there...
I like this vertical shot, it has nice leading lines in it.
Did you shoot at f5.6 just so you could focus stack? Shooting at f5.6 makes no sense to me unless you have a bad copy of the 14mm Rokinon. In my testing of that lens it was sharpest at f11. But that lens resolves so well even up to f22 with such minimal diffraction that to shoot all the extra images needed for focus stacking seems like quite the waste of time.
A very nice result here, but I really think you put more effort into it then needed.
I like this vertical shot, it has nice leading lines in it.
Did you shoot at f5.6 just so you could focus stack? Shooting at f5.6 makes no sense to me unless you have a bad copy of the 14mm Rokinon. In my testing of that lens it was sharpest at f11. But that lens resolves so well even up to f22 with such minimal diffraction that to shoot all the extra images needed for focus stacking seems like quite the waste of time.
A very nice result here, but I really think you put more effort into it then needed.
Jim
Thanks Jim. We have already debated/argued about this. As I told you on the other post, my tests differ from yours. I find the lens sharpest from f/5.6 to f/8, and the image is sharp as a tack all the way through. But thank you for pointing that out, because it made me re do the tests twice on two Rokinon 14mm lenses. (4 tests). Also, it is no effort at all. I love my work.
Quick question Mark -- when you did the focus stack, do you start front to back? And do you stay on manual the whole time so your exposure doesn't change when you re-focus?
dpbingham wrote:
Quick question Mark -- when you did the focus stack, do you start front to back? And do you stay on manual the whole time so your exposure doesn't change when you re-focus?
Either way works. If the sky is just right, often I will shoot it first. These day we often wait for the sky to be just exactly right... But more often I go from close to far. I am usually in AV mode and can fine tune/adjust the relative exposures later in Raw using a special point sample approach. Basically I will highlight all the images in ACR (Lightroom can work too) and put color sampler nodes into all the images in the exact same places and read their RGB values. Then I go to one image at a time to tweak the exposures to where they are as close as they can be. This very much helps Photoshop or other third party software to do a better job in the tonal part of the blending... This little tip plus a lot more is on my very popular Video Tutorial "Focus Stacking (for Depth of Field) Made Easy". If you want, just refer to my website for those...
