Use of Focus Stacking to Extend Depth-of-view For Landscape Images

(Colville's Columbine)

In June of each year, I become interested in photographing Coville's Columbines in alpine settings near our home and capturing their complex shape.  To me, Columbines are simply wonderfully beautiful flowers.  They also present an interesting photographic challenge.  Their structure is "three-dimensional" in nature.  Unlike a sunflower, for example which, if shot face-on, is basically two-dimensional, Columbines have long tail-like structures which project behind the blossom.  No single photograph can capture this 3-D nature.  One could, of course, pick a single blossom and photograph is from multiple angles but there is an alternative.

Up behind our home at an elevation around 8,000 ft there are many many of these blossoms.  One morning, I found three blossoms aligned in a row.  They were all new and fresh, one faced directly forward, one rotated about 45 degrees and one about 90 degrees.  The Nikkor 105mm F2.5 Ai manual focus lens mounted on a D800E was a great tool for what I wanted to accomplish which was to show the 3-D structure of this flower.  The 105/2.5 Ai is a wonderful lens, with excellent bokeh and a large smooth focus throw.  With the camera on a tripod, at the distance where all three blossoms were in a single image and at F8, I captured three images, focusing on the yellow stamens for each blossom in turn.  The three images were then combined using focus stacking to produce a single photograph of all three blossoms, all in focus.  Its simple and quick and no need to move focus points or worry about the two side blossoms at a location where autofocus sensors could NOT be placed on the stamens without moving the camera.

The results are shown below.

3-D Structure of Coville's Columbine (Please View Large)