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| I downloaded a trial version of an interesting application, Helicon Focus, that cleverly extends the range of depth of field by blending a series of images. Here I show two trial cases. First we start with three wine bottles. | |||||||||||
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Here's the set-up. I used a 18-70mm zoom with the focal length chosen to capture the labels of all three bottles
It is important to take photos in all-manual mode to insure that the only thing that changes is the focus. I took 8 photos changing the first focusing on the closest bottle and then changing focus in more or less equal steps up to the furthest bottle. The Helicon App then blended the 8 images to yield the final result. |
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Here is the first photo in the series of 8 - I focused on the nearest bottle
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Here is the last photo in the series of 8 - I focused on the furthest bottle
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And here is the output from Helicon
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| For the next exercise I used a 4-foot long T-Square that I use for cutting plywood sheets. This time I took 21 photos and I show the first and last in the sequence. I used my Nikon D300s in all manual mode. I used a 60mm fixed focal lemgth lens and used a f/2.8 aperture setting to minimize the depth-of-field for each photo. Again, I show the first and last photos in the series and the final result. The D300s has a nice feature - a live view of the CCD output on the camera's LCD display. Obviously, while this is on the viewfinder is blank. When in manual mode the LCD has a movable small rectangle and one can do up to a 5X digital zoom to aid in focusing on a specific part of the scene. I used this feature for this exercise and it helped a lot. | |||||||||||
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The first image
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The last (21st) image
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The result
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