Cactus Macro

With yet another day of total gloom outside I’ve resorted to macro photography. This is a cactus that I’ve photographed before but not in such close detail. This is my 100mm macro lens with maximum extension rings ( 67mm in total ) so it is about as close as I can go with this lens. In order to cope with the very limited dof this gives whilst my subject is round and has spines sticking out at all sorts of angles, I have photo-stacked 17 exposures. The danger of lens movement in this set up is very high so the camera was on a very firm tripod and micro-focussing plate and each exposure has been taken with mirror lock-up. In live view magnified you could see the image juddering every time I moved my feet on the wooden floor. Fortunately Photoshop in focus stacking has been able to align the images perfectly. The only problem with the final image was how to crop it as you were always going to cut across some of the spines so I decided in the end to vignette it fairly heavily as this helps the eye to focus on a smaller portion of the image. definitely worth seeing LARGE

Sorry for all the techno-babble but I know some of you like the grisly details.