Digital Photography Tutorial: “Focus Stacking”

I was born in Birmingham England in 1967 and raised near Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset.
At the age of 19, I borrowed my father's camera and travelled around Greece. This was the very beginning of my interest in photography. It was around 1989, that I came across the photographic work of John Claridge, a world-renowned advertising photographer. His work had a
very big impact on me and ultimately inspired me to make photography my
Career.

In 1990 I started up my own photographic business doing advertising work, and shortly afterwards I received my first big break - shooting Lifestyle images on location for Clark’s shoes.
Many assignments followed and I was on my way to becoming a full Professional.
Over the years I have photographed a range of people - from heads of Industry to TV celebrities. I have also travelled to many locations that would normally have been inaccessible if it were not for my camera. 2005 saw me change direction and shoot less people based work and concentrate on shooting locations & cars (another passion of mine). Constantly exploring new imaging technologies and developing new techniques I became one of the first car photographers in the UK shooting specialist HDR images for the CGI Rendering of cars.

In 2007, I decided to launch my online gallery to cater for the ever-increasing interest that has grown for my work as fine art.

In 2008 I started prophotoinsights.net which gave a behind the scenes look at professional  shoots and the retouching that goes into making some of my images.

My work has won many awards and been featured in all the major photographic press in the U.K. and been commissioned and published by many Nationally and Internationally known clients worldwide.
A small selection includes.
AOL
American Airlines
Bank Of England
British Airways
Clarks Shoes
Delta Airlines
Enviroment Agency
Hallmark
Headworx Clothing
IBM
Microsoft Multimedia Publishing
Minnesota Orchestra
National Geographic.
National Rivers Authority
Orange
Oxford University Press
Severn Trent Water
Time Magazine Online
Welsh Tourist Board

In this digital photography tutorial we start off explaining why keeping close up images sharp even at small apertures is a problem.

We then show a set of images shot at f/5.6 on a table top to use as a demonstration.

We then discuss various software available for producing focus stacking images.

Using Photoacute Studio we combine our table top demo images and compare the results to the same image shot art f/16.

Using photoshop we show another more manual method of doing focus stacking.

Following on we briefly show some tips & settings for shooting focus stacking.

Finally we show an experiment shooting focus stacking outside in he landscape.