Project Peacock

 

© 2021 Luke T. Bush

The pandemic added to the insufferable winter weather has forced me to spend more time than usual in my apartment. It’s bad enough frigid temps wear and tear on me when I’m outside but also my camera has a rough time. And with my comorbidities I have to avoid hanging around most places so I don’t catch something in the air or on a surface.

I’ve been getting back into closeup/macro-photography, the art of making the small big. One main problem is greater magnification means less depth of field, the area in focus with a subject. DOF can be narrow as a millimeter or less. A shallow part of the object is sharp while the rest is a big blur.

Enter focus stacking. I carefully take a series of shots, focus “slices,” meticulously working from front to back. Then I open that series of images in a focus stacking program that combines the sharpest part of each image, magically making the area of sharpness deeper.

A friend used to raise peacocks and he gave me some feathers. Now with focus stacking I can now really explore their color and details.

 (Click on each image to enlarge.)