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When it stopped raining that day, I went out into the garden to find water droplets on plants. I found an ideal subject and brought it inside, into a makeshift studio lit with natural light.
Kit - Pentax K311 - 35mmF2.8 Macro Ltd - Tripod - Cable release controller
When shooting macro so close the depth of field is going to be wafer thin, even at f8 or f16.
The leaf in this image is at most 1.5 mm wide.
The front of the lens is very close to the subject making for the composition you see here.
To begin, I calibrated my exposure in Manual mode, then set a manual white balance.
Using live view, peaking and manual focusing, I would start by focusing on the front most part of the subject.
With pixel shifting turned on, I would capture my first shot, then very carefully I would refocus through the subject, taking more pixel shifted shots until I reached the back of the subject.
This image is a composite of 37 individual images.
The images were loaded into Lightroom, and lens corrected with very minor exposure adjustments, the changes were made to one image, then synchronised across the collection for continuity.
The images were then exported to Photoshop as layers, aligned and then blended in Stack mode. Photoshop then looks at all the images and creates masks on all the layers revealing only the in focus parts of the image…
The image subsequently was flattened and returned to Lightroom for minor adjustments.
It’s a pain stacking time consuming process, but I think the result was worth it.
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 | Oli & Steph Prince Nice article Yvette. Do you find that photoshop is always accurate at finding the sharp parts of each image in stack mode?
Also do you just move up the frame from bottom to top or do you move the focus horizontal as well to sharpen the corners of your images?
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 | Yvette Depaepe CREW Thanks for your comment! Questions to ask the author of this article, my friend. Stewart Marsden wrote it. Click on his name on top of the article and ask him by mail. I never used the stack mode. Sounds great to me, I'm gonna try it someday ;-) |
| Oli & Steph Prince Thanks Yvette |
 | Stewart Marsden HI, yes that's how the stacking mode in Photoshop works, by masking out non-sharp areas.
Using live view with focus peaking i wanted my whole subject in focus, so I made a shot for every part of the subject front to back to ensure focus throughout
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| Oli & Steph Prince Great thanks Stewart. I don't have focus peaking on my cameras but currently use Canon's Liveview in the same fashion. Thanks for your help and article. |
 | Thierry Dufour PRO Thank for explanations, splendid macro. Thank to Yvette and Stewart !!! |
| Yvette Depaepe CREW Yes, it is an exciting article, Thierry. Thanks for your appreciation from both of us... |
| Stewart Marsden My pleasure, no go out and try it :) |