Even Christian Could Nail Focus With this!

Hey check this out… this is very interesting.  A camera that doesn’t rely on focus.  Doesn’t sound like a scam, sounds like the real deal.  If this is the case, it’s one of the biggest leaps forward in photography in a long time.

http://mashable.com/2011/06/22/lytro/

Brent

Playing About With Macro

We have had about a week of pretty constant rain here in Sydney, so that drove me into the bowels of my photographic cupboard to dust of my macro lens.  I haven’t shot any macro for ages, but was reading an interesting article in Better Photography about a new utility from the folks that make Helicon Focus (the focus stacking software).  The new utility is called Helicon Remote, and it is very cool.   Helicon Remote fully remote controls your camera and automatically performs all of the focus bracketing that you need to do to create macro images with large depth-of-field.  Its a wonderful piece of software.  You really need to click on these images to view them at full size to appreciate the detail in the images.

The images that you see posted in this post were typically stacks of about 20 separate images that have been combined to create the high dof images shown here.

To create these images I used a single off camera flash.  I used a straight reflector on the studio light to create the reasonably directional shadow.s

Once the images were merged in Helicon Focus, I then just processed them using Nik Silver Effex Pro 2.  I’ve printed a couple of these out large and they look pretty cool.

What started off as a wet weather experiment has turned out pretty well for a first set of macro images in several years.

the Helicon Focus sofware can be licensed for $50/year and includes the Helicon Remote utility.  You can find the Helicon software here.