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Snowflake 2016-39

The first snowflake photo of the 2016-17 season! Still a bit warm. It is from a 40 layer focus stack. Looks like something you could purchase at Tiffany's!...
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The first snowflake photo of the 2016-17 season! Still a bit warm. It is from a 40 layer focus stack. Looks like something you could purchase at Tiffany's!
Read less

OLYMPUS E-M1

settings

Aperture 40/10 ISO 800 Shutter 1/13 Focal Length 60/1

upload_date

Dec, 2016

Views

297

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Wow! these are stunning images you are producing, can you tell me how you achieve this please?

I have used many methods to photograph snowflakes from microscopes to my latest, the Olympus E-M1 with extension tubes and the Olympus 60mm macro lens. These are extreme macro shots at a magnification around 4:1 life size. Pretty much any camera can be made to focus this close but the issue then becomes depth of field. At that high of a magnification the depth of field is just a sliver. The Olympus camera and lens can do focus bracketing, which it automatically changes the focus for up to 999 frames. This one started out with a 40 frame burst but I only chose about 20 of those frames to use. I try to do most of my adjustments in lightroom to the whole range of exposures and apply the delevoping steps in Lightroom identically to all the frames. I then stack and align them in Photoshop, next I blend the stacked layers, create a group and duplicate the group. I ungroup the duplicate group and merge the duplicated layers to one single layer. Then I do the rest of my post processing on the image. Altogether anywhere from 4 to 12 hours for the final image.

Snowflakes are one of my favorite objects to shoot but I tend to have problems with the depth of field, still haven't figured out how to photo stack with my Photoshop CC 15 program, any suggestions?