Liquid Focus

“Liquid Focus” is what I like to call stacking focus using the widest
aperture of a sharp lens. I can just paint in focus with the razor-thin
slices of the wide-open lens, or sometimes I imagine it is like
dipping the subject in liquid focus, right up to whatever line I don’t
want to cross. And I can choose a sharp line of demarcation or (by
narrowing the aperture) a little more depth-of-field. It is also a little
like the new 3-D Printing processes, where machines increment
layers of substance to create complete three-dimensional objects.

In my early years stacking focus, I was always pushing the narrow
end of the aperture, pushing for as much depth of field as I could
get. Of course that was death on bokeh, brought on a struggle with
diffraction, and was mostly an exercise in futility, when I could just
as well been painting in focus exactly where I wanted it.

Then I spent a long time focus stacking by setting the aperture to
the sharpest focus, usually somewhere around f/5.6. That showed
better results than pushing the f-stop up to f/8 and f/11, where
diffraction begins to set in, plus I lose much of my nice blurry
bokeh. Still, neither of these is as flexible as wide-aperture
stacking. And it is not a tribute to my native intelligence that it took
me so long to discover the virtues of stacking wide-open, or
perhaps a stop or two down.

Of course these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. You
can use both and even single-shot photos become more appealing
to me since I have received my Nikon D800E. I have to do a bunch
of tests just shooting one layer as soon as I can tear myself away
from my delight in stacking layers with this new camera.

And you can stack with variable apertures, if you are very careful
with your histograms. Having several layers in focus, successively
deeper in the shot also works (I tried it), but I don’t use it a lot. I am
considering doing so, but all of this takes so long. With the huge file
size from the D800E, it can take me an hour just to stack one
photo, so I have had to relax and learn even more patience, which
is good therapy for me. I am too much in a hurry anyway.

And for years I have been more than a little envious of the quality I
can see in medium-format cameras and digital backs, so even if the