Focus stacking is a technique used in digital photography where we combine several images of the same subject to produce a single photo of superior quality and more consistent sharpness. If you're wondering why such , and how to make use of this technique keep reading.
Focus Stacking Tutorial / Photographylife.com
The challenge of inconsistent focus in landscape photography ...
One of the challenges of landscape photography is getting proper focus across the image. Unlike portrait and other types of photography, landscape as a subject often includes foreground, background and everything in-between. If you focus the camera on the foreground, background will be out of focus and look soft, and vice-versa.
That's not so much of a problem if you're shooting with an ultra wide-angle lens. But, as the focal length increases the lack of focus in certain parts of the image becomes more apparent. This issue can be somewhat minimized by setting a narrow aperture on your lens, such as F8 or even F16. However, you can only go so far by stopping-down on aperture, which can introduce issues of its own.
Furthermore, in case of using a telephoto lens as is often the case in landscape photography, you're reaching into distance, covering a large surface area that gets constricted into a single view. In such scenarios the lack of focus in certain parts of the image becomes most obvious, and will take away from overall image sharpness.
How focus stacking works in landscape photography ...
If you've ever seen a landscape photograph and wondered why it looked so impressive, one reason could be the use of focus stacking. This post-processing technique works by taking several consecutive photos, with the only difference between them being the focus distance.
For example, we focus the 1st photo on the foreground, 2nd photo on the middle-ground, and the 3rd photo on the background. The photos are than merged together using masking tools in a photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop.
Focus Stacking Sharp Foreground / Capturelandscapes.com
The final result contains the sharpest parts of each image, producing consistent sharpness across the composition, giving your photo an edge needed for that "wow" effect.
Using a tripod ...
It's important to keep the field of view exactly the same in each image to avoid ghosting artifacts when merging the photos. To avoid unintentional shifting of perspective, it's best to have the camera mounted on a tripod.
Another field of photography where focus stacking is a popular technique is Macro photography. Challenges there revolve mainly about aperture, but we'll cover the details of that in another article. In the meantime, enjoy producing superb landscape photos!