Focus Stacking Notes
Time Consuming
Focus stacking like stitching, some HDR, and macro techniques in
general is not for everyone. For example I generally am always in a
hurry, so the tedium, patience, and complexities of focus stacking
are perfect therapy for me. They slow me down to actual living and
I appreciate that. But many just don’t want to bother with such a
painstaking technique or don’t benefit from the patience required.
Space Expensive
Focus staking is also a real memory hog and if hard- drive storage
capacity is a worry, the 15 or 20 twenty- eight MB RAW files
needed to create a resulting 150 MB TIFF file is a lot. Multiply that
by a day’s work and you are talking real storage. Luckily storage
has come down in price and gone up in size from my first home
computer with its 8K of memory. And then you have to back it all
up. You get the idea. Focus stacking carries a price in patience and
in equipment.
An Approach
Not everyone likes focus stacking, either the idea or the results,
and I am in a perfect position to appreciate why you might want to
just skip over this technique. I, however, can’t seem to do that. I will
spare you most of my usual pitch about how no matter where we
look with our eyes, everything is in focus. That’s part of the appeal
of focus stacking. After some years of practice this technique is so
ingrained in me that I am actually uncomfortable if at least a certain
amount of the photo is not in focus. I am taking some corrective
photo- therapy and practicing at the traditional single-shot photos
once again. Focus stacking is a hard habit for me to break.
Impressions
I will also not dwell overly on my observation that all photography is
impressionistic since that seems to raise the hackles on any
number of photographers. Stacking photos is a real quick lesson
that we are sampling what we see and creating an impression. Any
of you who do post photo-shoot Photoshop work should know that
photos are impressions like any other graphic art form, but I won’t