Looking at my Lightroom catalog, I realized that I hadn’t done any serious photography for the whole month of January. That, and a day with no rain or wind, motivated me to get out and make some photos. My recent hikes at Mt. Pisgah and Ridgeline Trail have mostly been about exercise and Shinrin-yoku; yesterday I made a point of doing a very slow, deliberate walk. I was delighted to find the first signs of Spring – plant shoots and buds emerging that I recognize will produce beautiful wildflowers in the next few months. Osoberry is always one of the first flowers of the season in the woodlands of the Willamette Valley. The delicate white petals appear simultaneously with the budding leaves.
Tech Details:
This image is a focus stack; the automated Focus Shift Shooting of the Nikon Z (and D850) cameras is (cliché alert) a game changer for close-ups as well as landscape photographs. I love being able to render sharp focus from the closest petal to rear-most leaf and yet have the background be totally out of focus. For this photo, I used my Nikon Z7 in DX crop mode, 70-200/4 Nikkor at 160mm (240mm equivalent with DX crop mode) plus a Canon 500D close-up lens. I set the camera for Auto White Balance, and selected ISO 500 to get a shutter speed that would overcome any slight movement of the subject. I very often use my cameras in Aperture Priority mode but after reviewing the histogram saw that I needed to use exposure compensation of -1 on this scene due to the small area of bright white flowers against a predominately dark background. Then I went to Focus Shift Shooting and selected 7 frames at step width 3. In Lightroom, I did some basic processing (Auto for tone settings worked amazing well in this case), then exported the 7-frame captures to Helicon Focus. After a few touch-ups in Lightroom, I opened the file in Topaz DeNoise AI. This new app does a fantastic job of not just reducing noise, but applying appropriate capture sharpening at the same time. Once again, the Auto settings produced remarkable results. Disclosure: the link to TopazLabs is an affiliate link; I personally do use this app and highly recommend it.
Are you seeing signs of Spring where you live? Have you tried Focus Stacking? It has been a very popular topic for instruction during my recent photo workshops.
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