There I was, out in the marsh watching and photographing an incredible sunset… I’d almost got stuck in the mud a couple of times and I was worried about the incoming tide and the encroaching darkness.
I remembered that my kids had taken my headlamp out of my bag and I hadn’t found it before packing it back up.  Oops, I need to carry a spare. I told myself that at least I had my cellphone and it was only a short walk back through the marsh and island.  I’ll be just fine.

As I made my way through a densly vegetated island the sky absolutely lit up and I found myself scrambling to find a subject and capture the good light. I proceeded to quickly grab some shots, one of which you can see at the end of this post.  After the sky was pretty much done, one of those spikey bushes jumped out and bit me on my leg. Haha!

I carefully navigated around it and as I did so, I noticed this small, bright green, tree frog hiding in the spikey leaves. He looked like he was sleeping and then all of a sudden, ZAP, his tongue shot out and a mosquito was gone. As the mosquitos were thick I decided to stick around him for a bit. I popped on the macro lens and proceeded to prick myself countless times as I got the tripod and camera setup for this shot.  Ah, the joys of a short range macro lens.

Focus Stacking
Due to the ridiculously low light (after sunset) I knew I had my work cut out for me.  A slight breeze and a moving frog made things even more interesting.  In order to get the shot I knew that I would need to stack several images with different planes of focus. I wanted to get the frog sharp and as much in focus as possible.  I bumped the ISO up between 800 and 1600 and tried several different aperture’s all between f/2.8 and f/5.6. I needed to have a fairly short shutter speed as the frog was breathing. But I also wanted as much depth of field as possible. I captured several dozen exposures as the light faded.  I thought I got a few that would work.  I made my way out of the marsh with much difficulty and almost lost my boot at one point in a muddy stream.

Once I got back to the house I looked through all the images.  I ended up using 3 individual exposures to make sure his entire eye and a little bit in front and behind was in focus. I processed all 3 images in lightroom. One image was processed solely for the leaves and background. Then I combined them all together in Photoshop using layer masks. While I would have been much happier if I was able to capture the entire frog in focus, the conditions made it too difficult. That said I’m very happy with the result, and I’m kinda glad the bush jumped out at me. 🙂

The below image was taken 180 degrees from the setting sun, it was that kind of incredible display.

 

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Have you used focus stacking for macros?