This week’s photo was taken on a calm and overcast morning out at Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park last week when my good friend Wayne Simpson and I ventured out hoping to shoot sunrise and make the most of the beautiful fall colour. While we didn’t get much of a sunrise, the overcast skies and rain early on left us with fantastic light and conditions for detail images. We had a great time exploring with our telephoto and macro lenses looking for intimate scenes down in the valley bottom. This image was one of my favourites from the morning and was actually bit more of a challenge to make than you might think. Because I was working so close to the subject, even with my macro lens stopped down to f16, I didn’t have enough depth of field to render all of the leaves and drops in sharp focus. I ended up taking several exposures (5 in this case) and moving the point of focus for each one to capture everything in the scene sharply. I later combined the layers together in Photoshop using the auto align and auto blend layers commands. I haven’t done much of this type of focus stacking in the past or had a lot of success with the auto blend mode but I think it did a pretty good job on this one and I’m quite pleased with the natural looking results. I’ll definitely keep this in mind as an effective tool for future use on this type of image.
As always, thanks for stopping in to have a look. I hope you enjoy this one!