A Fall Hangout +rsp

I like the various shades of color provided by in this image. I guess I don't understand the focus stacking item especially with the 25 shots needed to do this. I have heard of focus stacking in landscapes where the view is from close foreground to distant background, but it seems as though this scene maybe is a smaller area. Regardless the image is pleasing to me.
Jim

 Hi  Mark     This composition  captures  the wonderful colors and  form  perfectly.. exceptional  detail captured by  your   25 shot stack.

Albert Darmo
Canada

Seeing it large was a surprise - one misses the drops and the strider in the thumbnail, and both add so much to the impact. Tells a story of where the strider might head to. Very good!
Wow, you sliced up this scene into 25 focal planes.At first, I thought that's overkill, but with 155mm and the scene being close, I get the idea why you did it.

This appears technically flawless for 25 images being stacked together.  The color, the color transitions, the sharpness are well done.  Was this PS or Helicon?  Did you do all 25 layers at one time or did you group layers and then stack?

Lovely stack, this image pops of my screen in 3D like fashion, great work.

Mark, This is super cool. The large version looks fantastic. Nice work with all that focus stacking and the outcome is wonderful. Beautiful colors in this as well. I do kind of wish the lower right corner didn't have that darker area but that is pretty picky on a great looking picture. Excellent work!

Nick Bristol
Lone Rock, WI

Nice job on this , Mark. The textures and color look great. I'm on the fence regarding the dark area in the right lower corner, though. The water strider adds a lot of interest, and the droples realyy set this off nicely.

--P

Excellent combination of elements, Mark, with the three different color pads and the strider. Well composed and excellent detail via the stack. Did you take any of just the water strider and the purplish pad? 

Great macro technique on this wonderful diagonal image.  The large has unbeilievable detail.  Love the surface tension  of the leaves and strider.  Excellent, Mark.

The larger version is a must see to see the best that this image has to offer. The sharpness throughout is just amazing. I don't know how you got that water spider to stand still for 25 shots but more power to you. My intial reaction is that this is a nice simple composition, maybe a bit too simple, but the larger version shows a great deal of richness in those lilly pads. A couple of comments. (1) There are some light blue linear streaks on the blue that seem to be photoshop related. You may want to take care of that. (2) I feel like there is too much empty space in the llc which is monotoned. IMO a horizontal that includes just the upper 2 pads is a stronger image.

Wonderful Mark, Great colors and the sharpness top to bottom is of course excellent.

So, with that many images for stacking - didn't that little skipper guy move at all?  I'm also curious, since I'm just starting out with this, have you experimented to know at what point the number of focus points is overkill?    Could you get similar results with just 5?  I'll be doing more experimentation in this area, just curious about your experience.

Great work with this one.

Thought I'd responded to some of the questions last night, but since I don't see a response, maybe it was in a dream...

25 shots:  Didi has it right.  Working very close to the near focus limit of this lens means that the dof even at f/13 is less than a half inch (~1 cm) and you need to have overlapping sharp areas.  All 25 were stacked at once using Helicon Focus and most of the post stacking clean up was also done in Helicon.

Dark area:  I wish that wasn't there also, but it's caused by another lily pad, just out of the frame and I wasn't about to reach out and remove that leaf because of the effect on plant and having it scare away the strider.  Given all of the subtle differences in the blue due to plants below the surface and it's overlap with the strider's rear leg, I don't think that I could clone it out either.

Strider movement:  The strider was covered in the first 3 or 4 shots.  If it moved after than, I'd only have more artifacts to clean up after the initial stack.  If it moved during those shots, all 25 are throw aways.

Alternate views:  For some unknown reason, this is the only view I took with the strider in it.

Remarkable detail (and patience!!). The depression of the water surface under the strider's feet is particularly neat!

Dang nice Mark!