Foggy morning start
The first part of my visit to Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge last Tuesday (2/2/16) was about as foggy as I’ve ever seen.
The first part of my visit to Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge last Tuesday (2/2/16) was about as foggy as I’ve ever seen.
Here’s what the movement looks like. When thinking about how to show this, I wanted to do something more than a straight on standard macro photo. So I positioned the watch movement at an angle to catch its reflection in the back case and made the final image using Helicon Focus software and the techniques I described here.
If you’re a photographer, one side benefit of romantic relationships is residual bouquet photo ops. However, you might want to make sure your significant other doesn’t think about why their arrangements are so photogenic. You are, of course getting the flowers for them.
Flowers are an easy photo op, although many of us don’t bother since so many flower photographs have already been made. But there are reasons to try: It’s good practice with your equipment and technique. Maybe you’ll come up with a different and beautiful approach. Maybe you can learn a new lighting or processing technique. And maybe it’s a convenient subject when you don’t have several hours to load up and go out in search of birds or other wildlife.
Under these conditions, my depth of field (DOF) was so shallow (about 6 inches) that I couldn’t get both birds in focus at the same time. I could have stopped down to f/16, which would increase the DOF to about 12 inches, but that still might not have been enough – and the risk of motion blur would increase when the shutter speed slowed down.
So how can you overcome such shallow depth of field?