Image editing

In this book I will not discuss the issue of editing photos as plenty of books have been written on this subject, and as many computer programs exist. Besides, I'm not an expert in the field, or a big believer in digital image processing. Perhaps out of laziness I take most of the photos in JPEG format and I do not modify them at all. As it happens in life one likes to hunt, the second to cook and the third to eat. I am definitely the hunter type. I prefer to take fifty pictures than process one. I would like to only mention of the computer program that seems important to me as far as macro photography is concerned. It is namely a program that allows you to blend the focused areas of several partially focused digital photographs to increase the depth of field in an image. The thing that many macro photographers have tried to achieve for years is now a piece of cake owing to this program. What is more, slight shifts or different sizes of the object in each picture do not affect the process of blending. The program handles it perfectly well. You can connect the camera to your computer, set up the so-called focus bracketing (the camera automatically shifts the focus point by a predetermined distance in a dozen or so pictures) and exposure bracketing (to change the EV increments in each picture), as the correct exposure is changing with the change of the focal distance and then a pre-set series of photographs will automatically be taken. Then, the only thing to do is to upload the pictures to Helicon Focus which will blend them and produce one with such DOF. It is a great tool especially for scientific purposes, for the multitude of ...-ists (entomologists, biologists, bacteriologists, botanists, etc.).

Below there are some examples illustrating the work of this program.

Canon 50d, Canon 100 mm L IS Macro, Macro Twin Lite MT-24 EX flash

And a few photos of locust obtained using the same program.