The Wind is No Friend to Macro Work
Michigan is for the most part just flat since the glaciers moved
across it like a snow plow (way back then) and scraped it flat. With
nothing to stop it, like mountains and valleys, we have wind and
have it more often than not.
Wind is a problem for any macro photographer but a much greater
problem if you are trying to stack photos since even a tiny
movement results in halos and other artifacts. The proverbial
advice for shooting in wind is either don’t shoot at all or be patient
and wait for a lull.
This is good advice except where you need to shoot five or ten
photos each at a different focal point. What happens is that you get
two or three shots off and the wind moves the subject (or parts of
the subject) a tiny bit. You don’t even see it because you have your
eye to the viewfinder, your hand focusing, and your mind busy
coordinating it all.
It actually is worse than this. The wind doesn’t usually just move
one blade of grass or whatever. It moves all kinds of things ever so
slightly, often too subtle for you to even catch but not too subtle for
your lens not to catch. The result is that all kinds of stuff moves
around.
Where you figure this out is back home on the computer while
processing the stacks. Photo after photo has some movement flaw
or all kinds of little wind-generated artifacts. Some can be fixed in
Photoshop but a lot are not worth fixing unless you like being a
photo-touchup artist for hours at a time.
To make things worse, if you are shooting seasonal flowers the
season does not wait for the wind to die down. Many flowers are in
and gone in a few days. We can schedule time for shooting but we
can’t control the wind which sometimes is strong enough to keep all
of the plants dancing for days at a time. What to do?
One thing we can do (although not focus stacking) is just use a
higher shutter speed (one that stops motion) and just shoot
traditional one-shot photos with as much depth of field as we can
push the aperture. There is always that. Or, if you are shooting
something like an entire flower that moves slowly in the wind and
can push the shutter speed up so that the whole flower is caught,
SOME stacks will work, because Photoshop will align the whole