Charles Ginsburgh
March 2023 - Poppy Seeds
Original
About the Image(s)
I went into my archives to find a macro image of some poppy seeds taken on Black Glass, that I took last summer. The magnification was quite large here (since these are poppy seeds), so depth of field was a challenge. Here I required a stack of 25 images taken with my Canon R6 with a Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Photo Manual Focus Telephoto Lens mounted on a tripod and focus rail (1/60 sec, f/8, ISO 400). As is often the case with stacked images, one captures far more ‘stuff’ than expected (including hairs, dust and other ‘junk’) so some extensive editing was required. This is more typical than not, so if you encounter this, things are progressing as expected. I sacked the images using Helicon Focus and cleaned up the image in Photoshop. Note that here I was not above moving a few subjects to make a more pleasing composition and I added some background textures for interest. I show this image as an example that good macro images often don’t just happen, but require a lot of effort to pull then off.
This round’s discussion is now closed!
6 comments posted
Your 65mm Canon macro lens was the right lens for this extreme magnification and I imagine you were at 5X to obtain this magnification we see on the poppy seeds. Then focus stacking with many images would have been necessary to obtain the good sharpness we see from front to back; otherwise depth of field at 5X is almost nill. KUDOS for all of the attention to fine detail and time that was required to pull off this interesting image. Thanks for sharing !!
Posted: 03/08/2023 12:13:49
Nice macro presentation of poppy seeds. You managed to capture incredibly sharp details in these tiny seeds. The shapes, texture, and hint of color on the seeds are interesting. The reflections on the black background works well. Your patience and effort paid off. Great job.
Posted: 03/11/2023 09:37:55