genji wrote:
DavidBM wrote
genji wrote
DavidBM wrote
On the other hand (relative to my last post) here is a kind of image I did not expect the Sonnar to excel at.
I do a lot of botanical photography; and it turns out the Sonnar's distinctive bokeh is rather nice on wide aperture botanical images (made possible courtesy of the TAP)
Here is an image (not great, but illustrates the potential) where the Sonnar bokeh gives a lively spatial feel to the bokeh with could otherwise have been a flat smooth blur, which somehow to my taste would make the flower spike feel less immersed in its environment (the actual flower is a focus stack of 3 f 1.7 images, the rest of the image is from one of those) Golly, that's impressive. I wouldn't have thought it possible to do a focus stack of a "living" subject such as a flower at such a close distance. Was there absolutely no wind at all? Very little wind; but it was hand held at less than minimum focussing distance (thanks, TAP!) so my hand was as bad as wind.
The trick is after doing your auto-align in photoshop, to set the opacity of one of the layers to about 40% so you can see how it is registering, and then move it around a bit to get is as perfectly in register as you can in the exact bits where you plan to blend. Since only the subject itself is focus stacked (the rest of the image is just the closest one of these exposures, to get best bokeh) it doesn't matter if you loose registration in the rest of the image.
Once you have the layers of the flower itself in register, I blended them in manually. Basically the three images had the bottom of the flower spike, the middle and the top in focus.
But no, you couldn't do this with Helicon focus..... Hand held !? !? !?
I think I'm going to have to lie down on the sofa and have a couple of shots of tequila.
Well IBIS helps a lot; as does the fact that you are focus stacking at f1.7 so with that wide aperture you can even use base ISO!