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One week, one camera, one lens week ending March 19 2017


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39 replies to this topic

#21
Dogbytes

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Sorry guys, time got the better of me today but, before running from the kitchen, I thought I'd share some snaps(!) of my retired Snap-On KRA3800 roll cab/tool chest - which now serves a set of interesting kitchen drawers!

 

DSC_4689.jpg DSC_4691.jpg DSC_4693.jpg DSC_4692.jpg



#22
alden

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Wow what a cool idea!

#23
Merco_61

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gallery_1251_656_402841.jpg

 

gallery_1251_656_650309.jpg

 

gallery_1251_656_400480.jpg

No evening shot from me tonight either. I totally screwed up with the lighting, so I will have to reshoot tomorrow.



#24
Dogbytes

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Snapped a quick few out hunting with the dog, this evening - and then a couple on the way home just now. Most are OOC jpgs, most are at ISO25,600. All are hand held...

DSC_4712.jpg DSC_4703.jpg DSC_4717.jpg DSC_4723.jpg DSC_4719.jpg DSC_4704.jpg DSC_4706.jpg



#25
alden

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What were you hunting?

#26
Ron

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Sorry guys, time got the better of me today but, before running from the kitchen, I thought I'd share some snaps(!) of my retired Snap-On KRA3800 roll cab/tool chest - which now serves a set of interesting kitchen drawers!

 

 

Somewhere up north in a storage unit I have a tool box just like that one... with about $40k worth of tools still in it. (from another life) {sigh}

 

--Ron



#27
Dogbytes

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What were you hunting?

Here in the good old UK, thanks to the Hunting Act of 2004, we are only allowed to hunt rats and rabbits with dogs. That is, only those two species are allowed to be killed by the dogs. We must take every reasonable precaution to prevent dogs killing anything else - and we do… Occasionally accidents happen but rabbits are what we hunt most. To be honest, it's just a peaceful couple of hours out, just me and my dog. Whether we catch anything is largely immaterial although Impy, at the sharp end of several hundreds of years of selective breeding, is very keen indeed. Whatever we catch gets eaten, I have no time for those who go out killing and then leave the quarry in the field. Thankfully, around here, most people who hunt with dogs are brought up with it and are respectful of wildlife in general and the land upon which we have permission to hunt. We hunt on 1000 acres of farmland and it helps the farmer in terms of pest control.


Somewhere up north in a storage unit I have a tool box just like that one... with about $40k worth of tools still in it. (from another life) {sigh}

 

--Ron

As a person with several previous lives, I feel your pain! No practical way to get it back, I suppose?



#28
Dogbytes

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Daffodils, a different chair(!) and Nippa, our youngest Lurcher.

DSC_4741.jpg

DSC_4734.jpg

DSC_4724.jpg



#29
Ron

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As a person with several previous lives, I feel your pain! No practical way to get it back, I suppose?

 

Oh, I can get it any time I want... just don't have any use for it anymore. And, no one wants to give me even a fraction of what it's worth. Pennies on the dollar. That sort of thing.

 

To be fair, a lot of the tools were specialized... and I suppose I could go up there and sell the stuff piecemeal. The roll cab is cherry and has that nifty nylon cover over it. Yours looks about as nice though. 

 

--Ron



#30
Merco_61

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Here is a watch from me, not as elegant as Alden's but it didn't cost even close to something with a good mechanical movement.

 

gallery_1251_656_171279.jpg

 

94 slices @ ISO: 200, Aperture: 4, Shutter: 1/40.

Lighting was a big octabox camera left and a sunfire reflector camera right. The watch rests on black Lucite and I used a match as a distance to get the band to hold it's shape. The hands are at 10:09:30 as is usual when shooting clocks and watches to get a nice geometry that balances on the face. Because of the angle, the crown being pulled out isn't disturbing. Had I shot it more straight on, I would have had to shoot the crown pushed in separately and composited it in in post.



#31
alden

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I love that. It's so clean and sharp. Wonderful details in the surface of the steel.

 

A Citizen Ecodrive is a really good watch. Great choice.



#32
Merco_61

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Alden, you have to remember that I used to make my living from product shooting. That said, the manual focus MicroNikkors are still wonderful workhorses, except the early production 55/2.8-s that had some problem with oily aperture blades.

 

The Ecodrive is a step down from my Certina DS Ti Quartz that I had for the last 20 years, but having several gaskets and O-rings changed and the watch pressure-tested with each battery change costs a fair bit, so when there was a sale on at the same time as the battery gave up in the Certina, I bought the Citizen. 



#33
ScottinPollock

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94 slices


Hey Peter...

Very nice... I'm curious about your technique here. Care to elaborate?

#34
Dogbytes

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I love that. It's so clean and sharp. Wonderful details in the surface of the steel.

 

A Citizen Ecodrive is a really good watch. Great choice.

 

Yep, agreed, that's a lovely image Peter. Great attention to detail.

 

I haven't got anything to show today - due to the fact that I put a different lens on the camera, this morning, when we took the dogs out.

 

However, I can see I'm going to have to do a watch pic for next week  :) And me with no macro lens too...

 

There have been some nice pics here this week.

 

:D



#35
Merco_61

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Hey Peter...

Very nice... I'm curious about your technique here. Care to elaborate?

It is a focus stack. I shoot one frame focused on the nearest point I want to be sharp and then move the camera forward a little bit to shoot the next one and so on until I have shot everything I want sharp. For a deep stack like this, a really sturdy tripod, head and focusing rail are absolutely necessary.

 

After shooting comes the time consuming part, at least when doing these without the expensive specialized stacking software solutions. Import the files as layers in PS using the File>Automate>Photomerge tool with none of the boxes at the bottom checked. When this is done, select all the layers and go to Edit>Auto-Blend Layers. Choose the Stack Images option. You might have to dig into the stack and adjust some of the layer masks to get rid of strange artifacts where PS has identified unsharp elements as sharp and included them. When this is done, flatten visible before you crop as you *will* get pixel-wide misalignments somewhere in the stack if you don't. 

 

Handling a deep stack is easier if you have Zerene Stacker or Helicon Focus. You don't even absolutely have to have a rail as refocusing between frames works well with the more advanced alignment algorithms in the specialized applications. I mostly use Zerene, but decided to try PS during this week.



#36
ScottinPollock

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and then move the camera forward a little bit


I thought I read you were using a rail. I'm surprised with such a deep subject there is not more visible distortion.

#37
Merco_61

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I do use a rail. The alignment in PS CC works much better than it did in PS CS6 and earlier. It shrinks the layers to match much better than it used to do. That refinement is probably necessary because of all the IF macro lenses on the market today as they change focal length so much when adjusting focus up close. Shallow stacks can be made by refocusing now. That would have been impossible with PS for processing before the CC refinements. It still doesn't handle stacks over 100 layers too well, though.



#38
ScottinPollock

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Interesting... I'm not an Adobe fan, so​ have done this sort of thing by hand in the past. Affinty Photo has recently added a number of stacking algorithms including focus. I'll have to check​ it out.

Curious if you found 94 focus points a little overkill for a few inches of DOF?

#39
Merco_61

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The DOF is somewhere around 2.8 mm for this situation. I don't like to go much over 1/3 of the DOF in step size to avoid artefacts, so a bit under a mm is about as big a step as I am comfortable with. If I stop down to f/16, the DOF ends up @~11 mm, which gives a step size of slightly over 3 mm. This would give a stack of around 32 slices to cover the same subject, but there is a considerable risk that the alignment wouldn't work so well with the larger steps in distance between layers. The 105/4 K is sharp fully open unlike most faster macro lenses, so deep stacks work best for me.



#40
ScottinPollock

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Here is a first effort with Affinity Photo's Focus Merge with 16 jpegs straight out of the camera. I know I should hae cleaned this thing but I was simply too lazy.  -_-

 

caliper.jpg








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Focus stacking with Photoshop

By Merco_61 in My musings on technique and sometimes technology, on 19 March 2017 - 01:45 AM

Source: One week, one camera, one lens week ending March 19 2017

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