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Ron Conlon
07-14-2014, 07:01 AM
This is a stack assembled in Zerene from 13 frames shot handheld, changing focus, shutter burst, outside, with camera-mounted flash: D5100 200mm f/8 ISO 500 1/200s.
There was a little bit of wind. The sweat bee crawled around the flower during the acquisition, so the stack was edited so that the bee from only one frame was included--i.e. the bee wasn't stacked, but everything else is. I was surprised that this worked, but was encouraged by discovering on the web that insect macro stacks at greater than 1x are often shot handheld with flash. This opens new possibilities (but more time at the computer, although this one didn't take that long).

Diane Miller
07-14-2014, 01:05 PM
Gorgeous detail and lighting. I'm amazed that technique works!

Ron Conlon
07-14-2014, 02:33 PM
Thanks, I really didn't think it would work, myself. While I have shot fewer than 20 stacks so far and thus I am no expert, stacking success varied with circumstance. Camera on tripod 200mm with single St John's Wort flower moving in breeze--most stacks worked. Camera on tripod tight on portion of same flower in breeze, some worked some didn't. Handheld shots of crocosmia, wide shots of most or all of scape mostly worked, tight shots on a single bloom took some editing to make work. Shooting dragonflies with 520mm of lens handheld, some worked, others didn't, probably would have worked well if the camera was stabilized--that much lens reveals every twitch when you shoot in a burst.
I previewed the stacks and discarded the obvious losers. In ACR I minimized the noise and reduced the default sharpening because noise seems to amplify and Zerene's output seemed overly sharp to me if I didn't get rid of the default sharpening prior.
In Zerene, there is an intuitive interface for retouching the stacking--I had to do this only for bugs which moved on flowers, and for a few low contrast elements like pistils.
There can be some artifacts which crop up--some of these are at the edges of the frame where frames didn't overlap, and others which look like banding--these can be corrected in Zerene by retouching. I had a minimum of these.

Most of the extra computer time was due to the larger number of files.

Jonathan Ashton
07-16-2014, 11:26 AM
Ron this is a lovely shot I like the saturated colours, it is quite uncanny so many of your images are so very similar ones I have intended to submit, I keep looking where you live and it is in Ohio yet so many of your flowers are here in my back garden!

Ron Conlon
07-16-2014, 11:33 AM
Thanks, that is funny. We hit a cold patch today, so perhaps you will beat me to the Japanese and hybrid anemones, the earliest of which have flower buds now in our garden. I am surpassed we are in relative synch now, because earlier in the year your flowers were weeks ahead of ours--of course this year it took a long time for things to get on track because of the viciously cold winter.

Allen Sparks
07-18-2014, 09:18 PM
Beautiful image Ron. I like the composition with the open flower to the far left and the closed buds running from it. Nice colors and background.

Allen