TECHNICAL DETAILS

Sony A7ii, Sony Zeiss FE 16-35mm f/4
1/20 @ f/8, ISO 100
Five exposure focus stack in Photoshop CC

DEPTH OF FIELD

A couple of years ago I made an image of this decaying boat along the shores of Burntside Lake, near Ely, Minnesota, with an entirely different perspective. I made that image with a Leica V-Lux typ 114, which is all I had with me on that particular occasion. I no longer have that camera, though I was fond of it. As a non-interchangeable lens in the ‘superzoom bridge’ category, it was a series of compromises, each one contributing to a little bit of required workaround to compensate. That day it was bright and blue, and not the onset of winter. I went for saturation and actually ended up shooting it as multi-image shot looking for ‘HDR without the HDR look’. It was quite sunny that day, and the deep shadows around the old hull, plus the brightness of the water behind, were far, far beyond the dynamic range of the V-Lux, with it’s small 1″ sensor. I was never quite satisfied with that image. So when I was poking around the lake edge recently, I looked at the boat and decided to give it another try. The Sony-Zeiss 16-35 is a better lens for this scene than the onboard V-Lux lens by a mile, and the full-frame sensor and dynamic range of the Sony brought extra tools to the effort.

This time, I visualized the scene in black and white, but with a full dynamic range and the deep depth of field that shooting at 16mm brings. I also chose a lower angle of view than before to bring some drama to the prow of the decaying hull and highlight the texture of the paint flakes and lichen. But even at 16mm, that composition was beyond the ability to keep everything at its sharpest. Back in the film days, with a view camera, some tilt of the lens would have neatly solved that problem. Fortunately, digital tools can too. I used focus stacking to bring through-and-through focus to the entire image, from the nearest pine needles to the far horizon—something that would have been impossible in a single image.

Focus stacking takes some patience. The process involves exposing a series of successive images, each optimizing focus on a particular part of scene. Then, in post-processing, the images are blended with layer masks, keeping only those parts of each image that are in focus. It sounds really complicated, but in fact, it’s quite easy. Photoshop CC (and other tools, too, to be fair) bring a lot of automation to the process, and the post-processing part is only a little more than a button click. But capturing the sequence of images accurately is detailed and persnickety work. It requires spacing out the focus planes evenly to ensure the appearance of seamlessness in the final composite, and when refocusing for each, it demands great care not to move the camera even the slightest, throwing image alignment off. A solid lens that is not prone to zoom creep also helps.

I probably shot 15 or more images of the scene, carefully incrementing the focal plane for each one, and shooting at f/8, which is peak performance for my Sony Zeiss 16-35. Reviewing the files in Photoshop, it was pretty straight forward to tell which ones contributed to the best focus gradation for what I wanted. The next step is to process all the component images exactly the same to ensure that the final composite looks seamless. I used the Nik Collection SilverEfex plugin in Lightroom to do the conversion to black and white for each of the chosen images. I did not do any local adjustments, such as dodging and burning, leaving that to the final composite. After black-and-white conversion, the five images were brought into Photoshop CC and stacked. I made a few manual tweaks to the automated stack masks that the software generated, and then I saved off a separate flattened image for final touches. On the final flattened composite, I used a 50% gray overlay layer and brushes to do the dodging and burning I wanted to achieve the final scene.

At the end of the process, I’m much more satisfied with this result than the previous HDR version. It’s always positive feedback when you can pre-visualize the end result of a complex, multi-step process, and then go through the technical steps to bring your vision to a final image.

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