Make your macros sing.

I wrote about Helicon Focus recently and for this new inductee to the macro world it’s fair to say that the software opens up new realms in macro photography. This application requires that you take several pictures of your subject, each focused slightly differently, after which it applies some serious processing to stitching together the sharp zones of each into one sharp whole. Magic!

Now your subject must be still and you need to use a tripod (unless you are very lucky doing this handheld, which I think is a long shot) to permit proper stitching of the sharp zones from your constituent images.

I import the originals into Lightroom in the normal way and stack them using the ‘time between pictures’ slider, which allows automatic stacking of pictures taken close together. I then export the stack in TIFF, making sure there are no export size constraints in the Image Sizing section of the export panel. The exported images are then dropped into Helicon Focus, I hit ‘Run’ and ‘Save’, then import the composite image back into Lightroom where it is added to the top of the stack, like so:

The deeper the required depth of focus the more images you need. For reasonably square on subjects with some depth I find 3-5 images works fine. For more drastically sloped ones, more may be needed. Digital film is cheap! Take too many rather than too few. The processing times in Helicon on my MacBook (C2D) are short – four uncompressed 72 mB TIFFs are combined into one new one in the space of thirty seconds. These are full frame TIFFs generated by Lightroom from the RAW originals taken on my Canon 5D.

Even though these images were taken at f/22, the close focus distance and the 100mm focal length of the Canon macro lens make for very shallow depth of field, so I simply set the lens to manual focus, focus on the nearest part of the image and take a picture, repeating with a small adjustment of the focus ring every 8 seconds, the time it takes for my ring flash to recycle to full power. That’s important – you really want your images identically exposed.

And here is the result – taken yesterday after more time spent wading in the tide pools at my top secret Highway One location on the Pacific coast, 22 miles west of home. This chap was hanging out on the underside of a big boulder waiting for high tide. If you do this sort of work, check the tide tables before you go – the best being revealed at low tide. He is maybe 3″ in diameter.

Starfish. 5D, 100mm macro and ring flash, 1/60, f/22, ISO 400, tripod. Four constituent images.

Do this sort of thing at sunset with glancing rays from the sun and add a touch of ring flash to reduce the contrast range and make all tones easily visible (much easier than doing HDR), and you get something like this:

Kelp at sunset. 5D, 100mm macro and ring flash, 1/45, f/22, ISO 400, tripod. Five constituent images.

It’s no surprise if I tell you that the Canon Macro plus Helicon Focus are in the running for my Best Gear of 2008 award.

If you want to see Helicon Focus applied in the more traditional area of photomicrography, take a look at the beautiful images crafted by Charles Krebs.