Maple Flower

I seldom think about the flowers of tree, but they have them (best way to get seeds, I've heard)

Maple flower, enlarged 3.6X

It is raining again in the Pacific Northwest—not exactly shocking news, although it looks like our third flood of the year coming up if the forecasts hold true.

I needed to test a moving stage for work, so I put my camera on it and manually moves the stage in increments of 0.1mm (100µm; 5,120 steps of the motor). I took a photo at each stop, and then assembled them in Affinity Photo as a focus stack.

The individual images have very limited depth of field (the more you magnify, the more limited your focus depth becomes):

A single frame, showing limited depth of field and dust shadows.

You can also see some dust shadows in that image; those need to be cleaned up manually. Preparing the images for the stack takes about as long as it does to shoot them in the first place.

There were a total of 63 images in this focus stack. That’s about 6mm based on the step size (0.1mm per step, times 63 images). That’s actually a long stack; as you dig deeper into the scene, the foreground objects get more and more out of focus and obscure the background detail to a greater and greater degree. I like the artful mystery of the obscuration, but you can have too much of a good thing, sometimes.