About Photography

With the Christmas holiday over and cleaned up it's time to sit down and relax with a nice glass of port wine, some walnuts, and Stilton cheese.

Special thanks to Chuck and Christine for supplying the celebratory prop!

To achieve a focus area that included the foreground walnut, glass of port, and plate of cheese sharply  focused, while the entire background went completely out of focus, I combined seven images, each with a different focus point. The aperture was set to f/5.6 on a 60mm Nikon macro lens.  5.6 was not sufficient to gain the enough depth of field to keep the objects in focus, but stopping the lens down would not have given me the soft, casual feeling I wanted to achieve with a shallow depth of field. So I resorted to the technique of combining images with different focus points.

The first image was focused on the foreground walnut.  The focus was then stepped backwards for each of the subsequent six shots until the cheese was the main focus. The images were then stacked together. The combined result is a very sharp mid-ground with an abrupt focus drop-off into the background.  The camera was a Nikon D800.  A candle hidden in the background provided a warm, cozy glow to the glass of port.