A Daisy

[jstp]

Hello,

This photo was taken using using a +10 close up attachment with the kit 18-55mm lens. I am not 100% on the composition, maybe I should get to whole flower in shot. Any c&c more than welcome of course.

Cheers

[FrankMi]

Hi Jason, owing to what is in focus, the subject appears to be just the bud and not the entire flower so I don't think you'll benefit by making the bud even smaller just to get the rest of the pedals into the composition. In fact, you may want to experiment with a closer crop to get the bud larger and see if you like the results.

What I did with close-up's like this was to use focus stacking to increase the depth of field to include the entire object, but that is a personal preference and it all depends on the kind of look you are trying to achieve. Here is a mundane example of a close-up using focus stacking.

[Geoff F]

From that angle, and with the outer petals out of focus, I agree with just concentrating on the flower centre. If you were shooting from directly above the situation could be different.

While focus stacking can produce excellent results under controlled conditions it isn't really suitable for outside work where your subject is moving around in the wind.

[Kathy O]

I really like the flower, something different . . . I think it is beautiful.

[jstp]

Thanks for the replies. Focus stacking seems like something that will be interesting to work with, I might try that out.

[FrankMi]

While focus stacking can produce excellent results under controlled conditions it isn't really suitable for outside work where your subject is moving around in the wind.

Hi Geoff! Focus stacking to improve DoF isn't limited to indoor or wind-less environments but it certainly helps.

In the following image, I was about 5-6 feet away using a 55-300mm lens. The wind was blowing the spider and web all over the place, so how did I get the entire spider in focus?

I took over 40 images, found the ones that were closest in the position of the legs and used those for the stacking. I really didn't care about position in the frame as I was going to align the images in Photoshop. I also didn't worry about the blurred background as the Auto-Blend (Focus Stacking) feature in Photoshop was going get the background to blend anyway.

This may have been more critical if the background was more in focus. In that case I would need to choose a single image for the background and blend it into the final spider image but I would likely lose some of the web if I did.

So for me, the bottom line is 'am I willing to do the work needed to focus stack a moving subject'? Not unless I am either learning the process or I have a really great subject I want to capture and am willing to take the additional time. For me, flowers can be excellent candidates for focus stacking provided I get enough images with a shallow DoF to combine and the background isn’t too sharp.

Hope this helps!