Mushroom Macro

[Kyle Jones]

Here's another attempt at some "shelter-in-place" macro photography.

This is a small mushroom I found in my yard. I held it in place with a third hand clamp and set a red pot from our kitchen behind it to serve as the background. I used an LED ring light for lighting. Shot with a Canon EOS R, 100mm macro, and a 25mm extension tube. I used a rail to move the camera for focus stacking. It may not show up at this size, but I didn't quite gather enough slices to avoid getting some blurry areas. I'm pretty sure I'd want a geared rail if I was going to get serious with this.

Any thoughts are welcome.

 

[AlanLichty]

At this scale and size this looks quite nice - nice kitchen studio work

 

[Ben Egbert]

Great results. When I tried focus stacking at home, I was unable to see when a section was in focus. So I assume you use focus peaking for that? Do you then just increment or do you reestablish a new focus for each step? How do you merge them in PS?

 

[Kyle Jones]

Great results. When I tried focus stacking at home, I was unable to see when a section was in focus. So I assume you use focus peaking for that? Do you then just increment or do you reestablish a new focus for each step? How do you merge them in PS?

I did use focus peaking to help guide me. It really is useful.

I set this up with focus at the minimal focusing distance. I then moved the slide forward (by hand on a half-loosened clamp) until the edge of the mushroom showed "red" in the focus peaking. I captured an image and then bumped the slide forward, verifying with the focus peaking that it moved a reasonable amount. I repeated until I was satisfied.

I did a basic edit in Lightroom/RAW and then brought all the images into Photoshop as layers. With all layers selected I ran "edit-align" and then "edit-blend" to stack. I did notice that since I was bumping the camera to move the slide that the original images weren't perfectly aligned. This may have added to the out of focus bands that resulted. I think next time I'll just lock the camera down at MFD on the closest point of the object and then use auto focus and the touchscreen to move the focus point into the image.

 

[AlanLichty]

Using the touch screen to move the focus point works extremely well. I have been using that ever since I got my 5D Mk IV. You will notice a slight shift in the image with each change in the focus point when you bring all of the images up in LR but the PS Edit-Align and Edit-stack does a very nice job with lining everything up.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Nice work Kyle. The head of the mushroom looks pretty sharp. If the blurry areas are in the stem, it shouldn't matter much as a lot of detail is in the head.

I use a RRS rail which has very fine pitch to control. I got this several years ago. Today they are many cheaper options as well.

 

[Kyle Jones]

Nice work Kyle. The head of the mushroom looks pretty sharp. If the blurry areas are in the stem, it shouldn't matter much as a lot of detail is in the head.

I use a RRS rail which has very fine pitch to control. I got this several years ago. Today they are many cheaper options as well.

If I was likely to make use of it much in the future I'd invest in a better rail. I can see how that would improve things dramatically. I bought the one I have simply to adjust the nodal point for taking panoramas.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Thanks for the explanation Kyle. I once had a program that allowed the software when tethered to a computer to adjust the focus. It then did the stack. But it was never very good and required lots of frame by frame editing to fix stuff. In the process, I learned that some of my lenses had such deep DOF it did not matter.

 

[JimFox]

Hey Kyle, I sure like your idea of a rail. I think it sounds like a great way to adjust the focus in a macro like this, much easier I think then actually adjusting the focus. But, the subject will get larger in the frame as you slide it forward, so I could see that causing issues too.

Anyway, I sure like this!

 

[stevendillonphoto]

Nice detail.