Today’s experiment is focus stacking.

I took 12 images of this flower, with a 60mm macro lens about 15 inches away.  With the lens set on manual focus, I moved the focus of the lens slightly between each photo.  Then I stacked the photos in Photoshop, and used the auto-blend layer stack option.

The result is pretty good.  What could make the result better:

• more patience on my part
• an automated way of changing the manual focus – there is equipment for this.  I just tried to manually turn the lens a small amount between each photo
• a steady tripod – mine is the $20 tripod version, so is not rock-solid within and between shots
• probably a different scene or getting closer to benefit the full use of the macro lens would be a more interesting shot
• Photoshop’s autoblend action creates a different layer mask for each layer in the focus stack, so it would be possible to adjust any of these masks to refine the results.  I kind of liked the way the automation created sharp focus in the gray background at the bottom, but not at the top, so I left that alone.