Fire in the hole

[John Chardine]

This is one of my wife's Freesias. The flower was lit with a lamp from behind and a flash was used to fill. I stacked 6 images and processed with Helicon Focus. I tried to make sure the reds were not blown and they aren't although the yellow in the middle is pretty featureless. This caused some noise which I removed in Topaz. I cropped to remove any of the BG.

I am very happy to be making macro images after losing my first macro lens in a burglary over a year ago. This new lens was worth the wait!

Camera: Canon EOS-1D Mark IV
Lens: EF100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM
Program: Manual
ISO 800, 1/13s, f/5.6

[Jonathan Ashton]

A visually pleasing image, I like the exposure and colours. I think I would have liked to have seen the top petal in its entirety, perhaps just move the flower down a little? The image seems to have stacked well, I wonder if there would have been sufficient DOF at this mag using f16, just curious to see how much was gained by stacking.
I like the sharpening, I think it would have been easy to over-sharpen a subject such as this, I look forward to seeing more of your macro shots John.

[Faraaz Abdool]

Amazing work, it definitely looks like something's on fire. I've never done focus stacking before, but I assume it's pretty intense. Great job here.

[John Chardine]

Thanks everyone! Excellent point about the upper petal Jonathan. I have recropped here but felt the need to fill small areas of the corners to maintain the effect of the flower, full-frame. I used Content-aware fill to do that and it worked quite well. I have the flower still set up so will experiment with different f-stops to see what I can get with small apertures. I notice a fall-off caused by diffraction starting at about f11 so I like to use sweet-spot f-stops if possible. The 100/2.8L seems to be excellent wide-open all the way down to about f11. Since diffraction is a function of sensor-site size as well, I would probably get less diffraction fall-off with the 5DII.

[Jonathan Ashton]

"I would probably get less diffraction fall-off with the 5DII".

yes I agree I suspect you would be ok to f16. I recall reading a chart somewhere illustrating the effect of diffraction and it demonstrated the effect for differing lenses and camera bodies but for the life of me I cannot remember where I read it. It may well have been Cambridge in Colour.

[John Chardine]

Here it is Jonathan.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm

I've taken a look at the page and there are some errors in it. On the one hand they correctly talk about the importance of pixel size but then in the Diffraction Limit calculator they use sensor size (crop factor), which is a mistake. In that calculator you can choose "35mm full frame" but we know that on the market today we have examples of FF cameras with 12 to 36 mp, and therefore vastly different pixel sizes. Diffraction limits are determined by the relative size of the "Airy disk" and pixel size, not sensor size.

[Bob Miller]

John...I like the repost much more! Nice work!

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi John, exceptional capture. Excellent handling of the light and the colors. I really like the RP because of the petal not being cut off.

[Dave Leroy]

Lovely looking flower. I also prefer the repost. As well as the full petal I prefer the new aspect ratio.