Into the fire

I recently upped the ante for my photography, having started Macro work. My only bane is the limited depth of field with the extra-sharp wide apertures. My lens supports f/2.8 all the way to 105mm focal length.

Great, yeah, but there's enough depth of field to capture the head of a small ant and the rest is blurred.

Great for shooting pics of curved credit cards.

Don't get me wrong - the usefulness is awesome, but for Microstock photography, images like that keep getting rejected because the remainder of the frame is out of focus and therefore has limited commercial value. Aaargh! :(

So I recently took images of burning matches on my black shiny glass/ceramic hob. How awesome.

I set Manual mode, f-stop @ f/8, Shutter speed @ about 1/50. Wait for the match to light and "SNAP".

A great result! You can see examples of these images at most of my online portfolios, to the right of this post.

I managed to sell a few of these already - so they can't be that bad.

I'd love to print a high-res A4 photo of this and put it up in my house as a portrait. I think it would look great.

In fact, it acts as awesome inspiration when people come to your house and comment on the brilliant.

The smile inside when you realise you took it yourself is somewhat rewarding.

Here are the sample pics off one of my portfolios:

So after burning out a box of matches, playing with I also tried my hand and Stacks and Merging to achieve maximum DOF for the photos at wide apertures. Photoshop is truly awesome!

The plan is: You set up at a low f-stop, to gain maximum usable sharpness. Then, starting at the front of your subject, estimate about 6-8 exposures at different focal lengths. Start at the front, snap. Then focus a little deeper, snap. Then some more, snap. 6 - 8 of these, load 'em up into a stack in PS, the Align and Merge.

And you're done. You end up with one image that's pretty sharp throughout, maintaining maximum focus from each shot.

Software is the way of the future :)

Careful now, don't play with too much fire. You may get burnt.