Focus in Blue

Very striking image, Pat! Nice capture of the blue. And the yellow stamens really pop.
What is helicon focus??

Hey Pat, nice comp and great color.

Nice rendering of those colours & flawless technique.

Superbly crafted image, Pat. I love the combination of warm and cool colors of the flower along with the clarity. BTW how do you like the Helicon Focus?

Ed

Thanks for the comments you all. I appreciate them.

Catherine,

Helicon Focus is a program offered by HeliconSoft that allows the user to increase dof in an image by taking a series of images of the same subject but at different focal planes and then loading them into the application where they are processed to create a composite image comprised of the in focus portions of the individual images. For instance, suppose I want to do a macro of a flower's center. Even if I set the f stop to 20, I probably won't be able to get the entire subject in focus. Plus, if there's much wind or low light I may not be able to get a clear exposure. With Helicon Focus, I'd pick a shutter speed that got me the shot I wanted but I'd take multiple exposures at different focal planes to capture everything I want in dof. I'd then load those images into Helicon Focus and create a composite image. It's a software solution to what would normally be a hardware problem. If you're interested in looking at there products the home page is WWW.heliconsoft.com.

In the image above I used nine or ten images, taken from a tripod over about a 30 second period. There was enough wind that I ended up with some artifacts (mostly blurred portions of the image) that I needed to clone out of the composite. Ideally, I think you'd use the software on images where there was no movement during the session. Although, since I don't know much about the software at this point, I'd be curious to see what happens if I had, say a bee, flying through the space. Would I get multiple bees in the final composite? I don't know.

Pat: Far and away my favorite image of yours to date. 2+ thumbs up! >=))>

Ed,

Sorry I missed your question. I think you must have been entering it while I was responding to Catherine. So far, and I've only had it over last weekend, I'm very pleased with the Helicon Focus product. I'd say that the user interface is very intuitive and based on my limited experience with it, it works the way I would want.

I have no idea at this point as to how much control if offers. How does the basic algorithm work? Does the order of image processing affect the final result? How is brightness handled when it varies between images - say a cloud passes over? How are anomalies in the shot defined and addressed? - the bee example above. I think it will be a lot of fun trying to figure this stuff out.

Pat

Pat,
Great comp and color! Love the detail in the center as well.

thanks, Pat. helicon focus sounds very useful. I'll be interested to see their website. Between that, CS3 and Flaming Pear, it's hard to figure out what you CAN'T do these days. Love it!

Pat, beautifully done. Excellent work.

Well done, Pat...I agree with Bill..one of my favorites, too!

Beautiful presentation Pat, nice detail on the petals. Sorry about the snow hope you get it melted before the ball game.
May

Lovely image Pat. A real pleasure to view.

Hello Pat a very bold and striking image love the colour and comp nice one.

Pat, my eyes have a stark feeling of depth and tridimensionality probably for the distance of the bottom from the top with all in focus, but also for the light, I think. Anyway, a beautiful, impressive image.
Pat, I tried Helicon Focus but I was not so bravo as you was. So now I prefer to take two o three shots exposing fore, centre, back and then merge them with the levels in PS.
Cheers.

Congrats on the pick Pat, beautiful shot.

Beautiful lighting and colors, Pat.

Congratulations on the EP.

Carol

Way to go, Pat! Congrats on the EP for this great image!

Congrats Pat. Well deserved.

Beautiful shot Pat. I'm very impressed by the dof you delivered here with Helicon, thanks for the explanations. Congratulations on pick of the week.

Pat,

I just saw this. It is beautiful! WOW. Congratulations on a great image.

Peter