Winter Jasmine

DDW's February 2014 Alphabet Challenge today was the letter J - tricky. Then I recalled the Winter Jasmine , which reliably flowers every winter in my garden. For
Bobsbitz59's Technique Challenge, I claim my wildcard for this week - a Focus Stack.

For those that don't know, a focus stack is the technique of taking multiple exposures of a close-up subject, each one with a slight different focus point moving from back to front (or front to back - I forget!) through the object. In this case I took 9 shots. I then loaded them into LR5 and tweaked to white balance before exporting them as a series of JPEG images. The images were then loaded into some free focus stacking software, CombineZP. At this point I just cross my fingers and run the macros. The software crashed on me on one of the macros, but fortunately left this image around, which I imported back into LR5 for tweaking and sharpening before publishing on Blipfoto.