Among the Fronds

While here in this forest for half-day I got triple treat of sun, rain

and even got hailed on 3 times. Canopy was so thick I barely got wet

and hail dropped softly as it made its way thru the trees. Thank you

for viewing and commenting. View larger.

Hi Jeff,

Forest greens are always nice subjects since the sensor responds best to these colors.

The scene looks good.

However, I do not see the advantage of the 0.8 second exposure here , other than the use of F/11 in a darker environment required such an exposure.

I would get improved results from your 17mm lens used at F/4, since no short focal lens perform best at F/11. The DOF is not an issue, since short focal length lens have inherently large DOF without the need to stop them down so far.

Best Regards,, Mike

Mike, Thank you for your comment and suggestions. Even with an ultra wide angle lens DOF is very much an issue here as I am inches away from the FG ferns. While it’s typical that lenses are sharpest at their centers around f5.6 that may not be the case for the corners. This particular lens (Canon 17-40L) is sharpest overall between f8 and f11. In fact I focus stacked this image with three focus points from near to far to insure sharpness throughout the image.

For an image like this, If you manually focus at f4 on a Full Frame camera (with 10x zoom on Live View LCD) at the closest FG element, you will see the BG elements will be significantly OOF, at least for the desired intent of producing a 24x36” or larger print.

Jeff, you just explained the focus, you stacked it. What a great demonstration of the technique. Regards. 

I think forest shots like this can be particularly difficult to communicate, simply because they can look very messy,  but I have to say this is delicious to view, the focus stacking has worked really well, but I'm always curious as to how that works, because if you take 3 shots with different focal points, surely there will be slightly different focal lengths that won't match up in size exactly when blended?  If anyone could furnish an explanation I'd be very grateful.

I like the finely detailed foreground fronds and the vibrant colours, then the view through the trees with the dappled light is really well defined. My only tiny negative comment relates to the horizontal tree, which you could do little about, but serves to kind of divide the shot into two halfs. But suffice to say the lush vegetation and atmosphere is exquisite and the image as a whole will rate a 7 from me.

Best Regards

Alf

Alf,

Thank you very much for your comment.

Yes, as each focus point is taken the image will shift slightly, this is called Focus Breathing. There are several software packages that deal with this but I use the Auto-Align & Auto-Blend features of PSCS-5. Do some research on this. It allows you to have complete DOF for critical sharpness. An important point is to try and not have changes in light between exposures as this will cause confusion for the Auto-Blend portion of the post-process.

Jeff, I suspected focus stacking, and I'm glad you confirmed it.  Having the ferns so close really creates an interesting composition; they certainly make a good foreground, and they hide some of that "messiness" that is inherent in a forest scene.  I wasn't aware that focus stacking was a feature in CS5 -- that's very helpful information.  I suspect that some scenes naturally lend themselves to this technique, with major segments set at different distances from the camera.

This is a wonderful image, perfectly conceived and executed. I agree with one of the others that making visual sense in the deep forest is extremely difficult. I've gone days without anything good, many times. Actually I don't mind the horizontal log so much as it has the restful bend in the middle. Moot point anyway. Regarding focus stacking - I use it at times with CS5. It certainly has it's strengths, and generally is superior to hand blending with masks. However, if you import your Raw files from ACR as smart objects, as you should, you lose that interactivity after the Auto-Blend process has been done.

Hi, Jeff.

Very nice and pleasant to see... As said before, is not easy at all making this kind of shots.

And thanks for technical details.

BR,

Ramon.