View allAll Photos Tagged focusstacking.
Life is complex. The mind is complex. Nature is complex. All for better or worse. When seen as the complexity of the intricate petals of a flower or the crystallization of a snowflake it is beautiful. Seeing the beauty in life when obstacles occur or when occurring along side the difficult is less simple.... but there is still beauty in the intricacy of everyone you meet and in each of our lives' paths.
For the theme of photo stacking I bought some beautiful flowers from Teatro Verde, and jumped in to discover it's a lot of work! I took 125 shots of this flower with different regions of focus at the 10x magnification using the live viewfinder. Once loaded into Lightroom, I choose 38 of this images that seem to capture all the necessary focal points. I loaded them into photoshop cc as stacks then used auto-align layers. I duplicated all the layers before I used auto-blend (“Stack Images” + “seamless tons and colours”). I merged the blended layers. The painstaking part is doing an inverted mask for each of the duplicate layers to fix any defects from the auto-blending process. Given my choice of f/2.8, my OCD tendencies, and the number of images let's just say it took a very (!!!!!!!) long time.
Female jumping spider (evarcha arcuata) looking into the lens. Focus stack of 10 images at 2x magnification.
These smaller snowflakes are more common than the elaborate “dendrite” crystals, but the smaller crystals are often easier on the eyes, trading complexity for geometric form. This one showcases a less common branch formation that looks like leaves rather than trees. View large! (press the "L" key for Lightbox mode!)
With branches nearly resembling an oak leaf or something similar, this tiny snowflake hold many fascinating details within it. The upper and lower right branches (but not the one in between) have formed on a layer above the other four branches. This is common in split crystal formations, and is very difficult to see with our own eyes… but the camera can capture the details that tell the story. :)
Many snowflakes begin their “lives” as columns, and plates grow from either side of those columns as the conditions change. Each of these plates continue to grow outward, winning the competition for water vapour on some corners and losing on others. This creates a multi-layered snowflake, more fragile but also more interesting!
When lighting this crystal, I tried to find an angle that just barely hit the surface, revealing all of the edge contours in the surface as it reflected off. The angle needs to be incredibly precise and it’s quite difficult to keep that angle stable… but once in a while it works out. You can see much detail in the ridges and ribs of this crystals as it grows outward, and how the light from my ring flash interacts with it. I cannot understate the importance of the right angle for each snowflake!
As with all of my snowflake photographs, a long post-processing workflow is involved, but thankfully only 23 images were needed to complete the focus stack. Even still, it took three and a half hours to create the final piece… and I fear tomorrow’s snowflake might be double that! While there are many steps required to arrive at the results you see, it’s a process that can be learned fairly easily.
With camera technology today, photographing snowflakes has never been easier, even though extreme macro photography always a challenge. The tools we have today are incredible, and often push against the limits of the physics of light. It’s a great time to be a photographer! If you want to learn the exact techniques in (relatively) easy how-to detail, I encourage you to consider adding a copy of Sky Crystals to your knowledge arsenal: www.skycrystals.ca/ - a 304-page hardcover book full of snowflake photography techniques, physics and great images.
Pollen covered Opisthoncus mordax (Biting Jumping Spider) on a daisy petal.
Hand-held 14 image focus stack on a Nikon D850.
Please enjoy and have a great day. ☺️
Species ID and location:
Opisthoncus mordax (Biting Jumping Spider). Adult male.
Victoria Point, QLD Australia.
Saturday, 4th July 2026.
Camera info:
Nikon D850,
AF-S Micro Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G VR lens,
Godox V86Oiii(N) flash,
Cygnustech diffuser,
Neewer LED panel as focus lamp.
Camera settings:
All images @
ISO 31,
f/22,
1/250,
Flash @ 1/2 power.
Manual focus @ MFD.
Eschscholzia californica,
The spring following the 2015 Park Hill Fire,
Eastern San Luis Obispo Co., CA
This species grows in many habitats and is not specifically a fire follower, but it showed up en masse after the winter rains in the site of the fire.
A spider scrum of baby orb web spiders on a vertical shed wall- Araneus diadematus. Focus stacked from 4 pics
see www.flickr.com/photos/lordv/142614824/
www.flickr.com/photos/lordv/142614826/
for what happened next
Stack of 140 pics focus step 0.015mm
Stackshot Rail
zerene Stacker PMax
nikon D810
nikon plan 10x/0.25 microscope lens on a nikkor 200mm f4 lens
This was taken from Waitts Mount park in Malden, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. It's a focus stack, with 30 frames blended into one with Photoshop.
You may remember this guy from a previous posting here; this is the front view. This was the pose he struck when he finally stopped running around long enough for me to fire off a few shots, before he resumed his incessant motion.
Red Velvet Mite, Callidosoma
Alexandria, VA
the same fruit in last october:
www.flickr.com/photos/wolfgang-kynast/39368773011
Now the fruit is open and ready to sent the seeds into the wide world.
Fruit width ~25mm / 1"
Focus stack
This appears to be rough precious opal, most likely Ethiopian hydrophane opal from the Welo/Wollo area, shown as a close-up pile of uncut pieces with attached host matrix. Confidence: moderate. The strongest visual clues are the translucent to milky body, irregular rough fragments, attached pale/tan matrix, and the strong play-of-color flashing blue, green, orange, red, and violet across many pieces. Ethiopian opal is well known for this kind of hydrophane, play-of-color rough.
Description
The image shows a dense assortment of raw opal fragments ranging from milky white to pale blue, lavender, and translucent honey tones. Many pieces retain rough, chalky or rocky host material on their surfaces. The most striking feature is the vivid internal iridescence—broad flashes and patches of spectral color that shift across the stones, especially blues, greens, purples, and orange-red fire. Opal is a hydrated silica mineraloid rather than a true crystalline mineral, and precious opal displays this color effect because of its internal structure. Ethiopian hydrophane opal can also change appearance when it absorbs water, sometimes altering transparency and color intensity.
Closest alternatives / look-alikes
Less likely possibilities are:
Australian rough precious opal: also shows play-of-color, but this image looks more like the translucent hydrophane-type rough commonly associated with Ethiopian material.
Common opal or opalite glass: unlikely, because the image shows genuine-looking irregular play-of-color and natural matrix attachment rather than a uniform man-made glow.
Just some macro fun with an orchid I have in a flower pot.
My first attempt with focus stacking using Zerene Stacker.
Tried several times using Adobe Photoshop CS5 with completely useless results. Downloaded Zerene Stacker (trial) and it worked flawlessly on the first attempt. Go figure :-)
Not completely sure whether I'd prefer to have more light from the top, but I really like the dramatic light from the bottom. :-)
Strobist info:
Key: naked SB-800 with grid, directly below subject
Fill: SB-800, shoot-through umbrella, 45 degrees above subject, camera left