29th Jan 2020 Excursion to the woods

Excursion late afternoon into the woods, hoping for some fallen tree detail.  Just love me some dead wood,
rotting is beautiful.  Sat a good while in the parking lot of the park getting myself ready; after getting out the car and dressed up for my walk, the ranger comes over and tells me the park gates are closing in 25 mins – Oh, where else can I park – I will show you.  So now I’m safely parked and won’t get locked in, off I go.  There is immediate satisfaction with a fallen tree close by.

This is where I discover you have to make sure your batteries are charged for everything you bring… my Arsenal is not charged (which I use for focus stacking) so I go old school and do it manually on the Tokina 100
Macro, including some with extension rings.  The two methods I use are to attempt to point the auto focus at
different parts of the scene trying to ensure it is sequentially front to back through the focal plane.  Difficult to
achieve consistently.  The other method is to start with the nearest point, and manually focus further back.  This means you have to gauge how far to go each nudge to ensure the f-stop in use will render acceptable sharp range in each shot to stack with a smooth progression, and not have bands of out of focus
mixed in.

So, what did I get from the 115 photos taken:

19 subject/compositions.  Some were focus stacks of 3 to 15.