I was testing something else out entirely when I stumbled on this. I was tinkering with a Rock 3A and seeing if it could cope with a YouTube video. At 720P it seemed fine so I browsed to Jeff Geerling’s excellent channel and looked for a random clip. Rather than twenty seconds, I ended up watching the whole video on focus stacking and thought it worth a go.
The middle is in focus. Shame about the rest.The problem with macro photography is that the focussing plane is really thin, sometimes only a few mm deep. So to take a picture of a circuit board it’s necessary to take lots of pictures with ‘slices’ of the board in focus and then join them up afterwards. I’ve got plenty of circuit boards I’d like to photograph so grabbed one. It’s the first board for a Spectrum that I wrote about last year. Here’s a single image from the set; you can see how the middle is in focus but that’s about it.
The stacked image with everything in focus.Two things made this possible. The first was the Canon Connect App for Android which let me use the camera remotely. There was no need to touch either the camera or len and shift the camera slightly; I could just use remote live view to select different parts of the board and capture an image. The other thing was an excellent open source focus stacking app called Chimpstackr that could merge the images. With all of the pictures taken and exported from Lightroom I gave Chimpstackr a try. The results are impressive; there’s a small amount not in focus but most looks good. I’ll definitely try a few more sets of pictures to see what it can do.
