Impossible Photography

Welcome to my new blog. I am Laurie Knight and I am a keen focus-stacking micro photographer.

What is "Focus Stacking" and why would you be interested in it? And what's with the name, "Impossible photography"?

Focus Stacking is a technique used to gain extended depth of field (most commonly used in the field of macro/micro photography).

The technique involves shooting multiple exposures of the subject changing the focus distance slightly between each shot. This gives you a number of photographs each containing a 'slice' of the subject in focus, which when all combined together using dedicated software, produces a single photograph with more depth of field than would otherwise be possible. E.g.

This shot is of part of the eye of a weevil (Polydrosus species) shot at 40x magnification onto the sensor. This is not a giant insect, the entire weevil is approximately 5-6mm long. The field of view of this shot is roughly 0.45mm on the long side. This is a stack of 44 input images at 4 micron focus steps.

Until about a decade ago, the computing power to do this image combination (in a sensible timescale) was not available to the amateur photographer (or even really professional photographers, who don't normally own supercomputers!). Nor was the image combining software available.

Now things are different, even a basic modern computer is easily capable of focus stacking. And a number of software packages are available, most with a free trial, one is completely free. (I will go into more detail about the various software packages in a future blog post).

So to take the photograph above would have been completely impossible a decade ago and is now possible. Hence the blog name.

Well I hope I've piqued your interest! Please check back for more articles on focus stacking soon.