Yesterday, I hit several great photo spots early morning before meeting four others in Andover for a strenuous loop climb of Ragged Mountain. I stopped at the “hidden” falls in Sunapee, Cricenti’s Bog, and Elkins. I made this photo in Elkins. The mushrooms were about 15 inches from my lens. I shot them at f/10 (and ISO 100, 1/2 sec). Yet everything in the image is sharp from the grass in the foreground to the trees and falls in the background. There is much more depth of field than one would expect. Why? How? You can examine a larger version of the photo if you click the image below.
How was sharpness achieved? I used a sharp lens and set it at one of its sharpest apertures. Most lenses are sharpest at middle apertures or several stops down from wide open. I got good depth of field by taking photos at different manually focused distances from in front of the mushrooms to the falls. I took 9 photos which might have been a bit of overkill. Most of them were focused in the first 4 feet of the depth because this is where the DoF is shallowest.
I then loaded them from Bridge into Photoshop as separate Layers. (Tool>Photoshop>Load Files into Photoshop Layers.) Then it was just a matter of selecting all Layers and successively choosing Edit>Auto-Align Layers and Edit>Auto-Blend Layers. Almost like magic. At this point the image size in Photoshop was 3GB! You want to have a decent amount of RAM to do this.
The resultant image had a few areas where Photoshop did not make good choices. So I manually edited a few of the layer masks, saved the full version with layers, then further edited a cropped and flattened version a bit.
What is your reaction to the composition of this photo? When shooting a scene with a wide angle lens it is often good to compose in depth. Have a strong foreground that fills about a third of the image, a middle ground, and a background. Too many images lack a meaningful foreground so everything is just “out there”.
Was all this work justified for a photo of a few mushrooms. You can decide. But it is possible this photo could wind up on a magazine cover because it has some of the features magazines like: it is vertical, it has a place at the top for the magazine masthead, and there is room to the right of the mushrooms for text highlighting the features in the issue.