Pansy; © reserved 2009, Richard Lovison

This was another experiment with Helicon Focus using seven images with different points of focus to form a merge. The flower was shot indoors using natural window light.

Great Blue Heron; © reserved 2009, Richard Lovison

I visited a heron rookery this morning after two years of absence. I found only two nests when there were three two years ago… the last ice storm did a lot of damage to this area.

Upon arrival to the pond I frightened two herons on the nest closest to the shoreline where I was standing. One flew out of sight and the other, I’m guessing the female, flew to the top of a tree across the pond. There she perched for almost two hours. I waited patiently for her to return to the nest which was about 100 feet away though she never did. As I was just about to leave she took off form her perch and I quickly snapped 5 frames in succession. The above image was the best of the five.

The image was taken with an Olympus E-3 coupled to a Takahashi FC-60 refractor telescope (1000mm 35mm focal length). With that setup I had no choice but to shoot at a wide open aperture of f8 and I had to manually focus with rack and pinion focusing. So what I did was point the tripod-mounted camera and scope at the heron, leaving space in the direction I felt she might take flight, focus on her and hope when she took off that she flew in a plane parallel to me. What fun!

Rose; © reserved 2009, Richard Lovison

I discovered this rose at the bottom of my grocery cart while shopping at a local store yesterday morning. I figured I must have found it for a reason so I took it home to create some images.

The rose was placed in a rose colored translucent dish filled with water. A rock was placed underneath the surface to “anchor” the flower so it wouldn’t freely float about the dish. Natural window light was used.

I’ve been experimenting with the demo version of a program called Helicon Focus. It allows one to merge a series of macro images taken with different points of focus to create a final image that will be sharp from front to back. The program works well, generating few artifacts as long as the depth of field isn’t too great. Even if artifacts are generated, there is retouching available within the software where one can clone from the original source images into the merge to fix problem areas. Overall I find the pro version a great tool though a bit on the expensive side. Costing close to a third the price of a full version of CS4 is a bit high in my opinion.