thickening till
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Shortly after the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself dipped behind New Jersey, one decided to engage in the usage of a tripod to conquer the night. One was also involved in a bit of experimentation as well, capturing multiple images and combining them using the focus stacking technique. The one above ain’t fancy, it’s just a longish exposure at a very high ISO setting.
Canada Geese don’t seem to migrate away from the Newtown Creek these days, and I’m fairly sure it’s because of the guy in Maspeth who puts out food for them. I see these dicks all year long nowadays. All geese are dicks, and Canada Geese are especially so.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This one and the one below are “fancy” gimmick shots. Focus stacking is a technique used in landscape photography wherein you use a tripod and lock the camera in place. You’ll then move the point of focus around in the shot to foreground, center, and then far/infinity. Back at home, when you’ve finished your photoshop photo developing, you use the application to combine the three or more shots into a single image which has a uniform level of sharpness and a deep depth of field.
Lately, I’ve been playing around with following moving objects through the frame with the focus stack technique in mind, which creates a “timeline” effect of several moments in time inside of single image. Notice that reddish zone at the bottom of the shot, where a bunch of Canada Geese were doing dickish things.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There were only four Geese in the shot above, for instance, but when I combined the multiple shots into one, there was suddenly a full gaggle in frame. I plan on finding an overpass sometime soon and using this technique with passing cars. I like the idea of creating a traffic jam where there wasn’t one.
More tomorrow.
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Why not take one shot stopping the lens down and using the hyperfocal distance technique for sweeping depth of field? Why the extra work with multiple shots at different focusing distances and then all the rigmarole on the computer screen combining them?
georgetheatheist . . . simply put
February 17, 2022 at 11:22 am
I dislike the “Photo Stacking you describe because it is not pure photography but a kind of cheating like a paste-up. But I can understand your doing this from the point of view of a page layout designer. HOWEVER, I learned from Ansel Adams’ book on The Camera how to obtain this same result by using the lens tilt feature of a view camera to bring both foreground and background into focus at once with a gradually variable point of focus from top to bottom of the frame.
Mike Olshan
February 17, 2022 at 1:51 pm