About the Image(s)

It was time to try something that would stretch my abilities some.

I recently obtained a new ultra-macro lens, a LAOWA FF 45mm F2.8 Ultra Macro 1-5X APO lens (RF Mount), (quite a mouthful), and it was time to try it out. This manual focus lens is similar to the Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x manual focus Macro lens in its magnification ability, but as an APO lens when you obtain your focus at 1X, you can adjust the magnification (say to 3 or 4x) and still retain your focus. Finding and retaining the focus during use was always a challenge with the MP-65 lens, so this ability made the set-up and use of the LAOWA lens much easier. I installed the lens on my Canon R5 II body and then mounted the Camera / Lens on to a Manfrotto 454 focus rail. I added a cable release to the camera, and the set-up was then mounted onto my tripod. I have included a couple of images to show my set-up and the relative size of the actual subjects.

I employed this set-up to capture this image of five Poppy Seeds on a piece of black glass. You all know how small poppy seeds are and this line of five seeds was about 10 mm in length. I collected a series of 92 focus slices (1 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 at a magnification of 3:1) using ambient room light. I also added a small diffuser to cast a slight shadow over the subject to soften the light (I am not sure if this helped, but I did this anyway). This was quite a significant magnification, so my observed depth-of-field was about 1/3 of a poppy seed, thus the large number of slices collected. Between each slice I rotated the focus rail turn-screw about 1/10th to 1/16th of a turn. Not a lot of distance traveled between each slice, but enough to shift the in-focus area.
The focus slices were stacked in Helicon Focus and then the stacked image was processed quite a bit in Photoshop (I provided the stacked version before processing in Photoshop).

Let me know what you all think about this effort...