I have spent a few days recently (June 2020) having a go at focus stacking. This is a way of getting much greater depth of field than is possible with any normal lens. It is done by taking a whole set of images, identical except for a very small change of focus from one to the next. Clever software is then used to combine them; clever in that it picks out the bits actually in focus from each image! I used Serif Affinity Photo.

Three days, and three experiments. All experiments were done with a Sony Alpha 77 Mk1 (2012 vintage). Lenses used were the Sony 100mm f2.8 macro lens, sometimes with extension tubes, and a Sony 16-50mm f2.8 zoom reversed on the camera. I was interested in seeing which combination gave the clearest results. All images were processed in ON1 Photo RAW 2020.

Day one was with a garden flower - Love-in-a-mist - and included both the flower and its seed pod. The images from this daye are here. As a further experiment ( thinking of perhaps trying it with insects in the wild) the final image was made froma set of fast-fire handheld images ans was, I think, reasonably successful.

Day two was spent experimenting with the reversed lens, something I had never tried before. It proved a little frustrating as I tried an object that was simply too deep (front to back) for the software to cope with. It left a lot of shadowing round the edges of the object. The final image tried was more successful and is here, along with the shell of which it just a small section.

Day three was more successful. I found a tiny (dead) fly and tried images of it both with the macro lens by itself, the macro lens with extension tubes and the reversed lens initially at 50mm then zoomed to around 25mm. This last is interesting as zooming out a reversed lens increases magnification! The images from this day are here. The first two are the macro lens at 1:1 magnification, the second one using a ruler to show the actual size of the fly. The rest are the mages close-ups of the fly, some cropped a little though the last one is almost the full sensor size.