How to Shoot with Focus Stacking in the Field
David Johnston
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There are many obstacles for outdoor photographers to overcome when shooting in the field. For example, you think you have a tack-sharp photo when you look at the image on your camera, but when you look at the photo on the computer screen you realize that it’s slightly out of focus. One of the ways you can fix focus issues is using a smaller aperture such as an f/16. However, even a small aperture can reveal some fuzzy focusing. In order to be sure you have tack sharp focus throughout a deep field of focus, you need to use a technique called focus stacking. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to focus stack in the field for the sharpest photos ever.
Hey, what's up guys, Landscape Photographer David Johnson here, in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And what I wanna talk about today is focus stacking in the field. Focus stacking is a really good technique to be sure that you get as much focus within the image as possible. I know it's easy to take one image at like f/16 ISO 100 to be sure that you get enough focus within that. And f/16 is probably going to do that.
But what about when you get a scene like this behind you? In this scene, you have tons of trees that are going back in different focal distances throughout, and then you have the waterfall at the very back of this scene that you wanna shoot within acceptable focus. How do you actually do that? I'm not really sure that f/16 is going to do the job. For that situation, you wanna use what's called focus stacking, and focus stacking is basically something that you can use at f/16, you can use at f/8, f/11, f/14.
But what you do is you set your camera up, in this situation I'm using a telephoto lens. And what you do is as you set the camera up, you adjust your focus for each focal distance. So basically what I'm going to do is stand back here, take a different focal distance images, going back from one tree, to the next tree, to the next tree, to be sure I get every single tree within focus, and then lastly, the waterfall in the back within focus as well. This is the way to be sure that you have these sleeves and these sheets of focus going back throughout your series of images, and then you can compress and stack these later and Photoshop or other post-processing softwares. So basically what you do is set up in the same frame, just readjust your focus throughout the frame, and then you compress all of those together, to create an absolutely amazing tack sharp image of outdoor photography.
Always well done. Thank you for your continued inspiration and training ideas
One answer would be to change the settings and fire the shutter via app. Then the only nudge would be wind and possible motion from the shutter.
Seems like it would be extremely difficult to shoot a series of photos that you plan to stack, while actually handling the camera in between each one even if only adjusting the focus ring. The slightest nudge would hopelessly reframe the scene enough to goof it up.