Creating the Botanical Illustrations
Flowers in Focus
When you take pictures of flowers close up, the depth of focus is very thin. It can make a nice dreamy effect with a lot of fore- and background blur. But if you want to present the flower with all its intricate details in full sharpness, you have to take a different approach.
By taking several pictures at different focus depths from the front to the back of the subject, and combining the pictures and only keeping the parts from each picture that are in focus, you will end up with one picture where the whole subject is in focus; front to back. The photographic technique by which several pictures are taken at different focus depths from the front to the back of a subject is called focus bracketing.
To combine all the pictures into one sharp picture, using layers in Photoshop for instance, is almost impossible to do by hand. For even the smallest flower you might need more than 50 frames. Fortunately, there are specialized software, which can automate this process. I use Zerene Stacker, which gives fantastic results. This process of combining the frames is called focus stacking.
<- 65 mm, f 4.0, 23 images stacked
Preparations
Needless to say, to photograph the flowers close up, it has to be more or less windless. This is even more true, if you want to focus bracket the subject. Even the slightest movement between frames could ruin the final picture. For the focus stacking program to be able to combine the frames, the subject has to be perfectly aligned.
So, I choose to photograph the flowers on a windless day, and in between those days I scout the nature for subjects to photograph.
My primary gear for macro photography:
Fujifilm XT-2 (a XT-1 as backup)
Fujifilm 60 mm F2 (1:2 macro, wonderfully light and small)
Laowa 65 mm F2.8 (2:1 macro, manual focus lens)
Manfrotto tripod (works very well for macro, albeit slightly heavy)
NiSi NM-180 focus sliding rail (for really close up with the Laowa lens)
In addition, I bring with me a large transparent reflector screen (for shielding the sunlight and wind), a matt off-white and black cardboard (backgrounds for the flowers).
Flowers in the field
Perhaps it sounds complicated to focus bracket and then stack the frames into one final picture. It is quite simple, but it takes a lot of patient and work. And time.
Flowers are everywhere so finding a suitable subject is straightforward. But I have a vision with my flower photography. I want to tell a story about the subject. Much like the flower posters we saw back in school. They showed how the flowers developed from seed through a small plant to a fully grown beautiful flower until it withered down to start the cycle all over again. I some sense I want to convey that with my photography, although in a smaller scale.