Pixiq

I have been using focus stacking for many months to gain extra depth for 3D flowers – especially ones with deep trumpets. For these you need calm conditions so the subject remains static as well as constant lighting.

One hot day, I was working in our sunroom with the door open taking a flower with floppy petals and had not realized they were moving in a slight breeze. When I produced the 3D stack using Helicon Focus software, instead of the frames blending into a perfect stack, several were mismatched – quite hopeless for a botanical shot, but it triggered the idea for a novel way to create Impressionist images. 

As well as taking successive shots by moving the camera forward in equal steps on a focusing rack, I also moved the camera slightly up and down as well as sideways to get the effect I wanted. Sure enough, it worked a dream and here are some recent efforts. The Algerian iris above has a strange glass-like quality.

You can achieve a similar effect by keeping the camera fixed on a tripod whilst taking a succession of colorful leaves blowing in the wind against a blue sky, without advancing the camera.  But don't forget the lighting needs to be constant. 

If you don't want to invest in the software, you can also get Impressionist shots within some cameras. Several Nikon models have the option of selecting between two and ten exposures to combine into a single multi-exposure shot. The camera automatically sets the gain so that each shot is underexposed, but – providing the light remains constant – together they build up produce the correct exposure in the final multi-exposure frame.  

With a static subject, and using a camera on a tripod, make very small adjustments to the composition of each exposure as described above. For large, colorful flowers or a tree blowing in the wind, again the camera needs to be fixed because the movement is done by the wind instead of the camera so that the leaves are recorded slightly out of alignment for each shot.

The other neat thing about this technique is that if you shoot indoors using a white backdrop, the color can be changed very speedily by using the paint bucket as it does not matter if every speck in infilled with the new color or not.  This can be seen with the gladiolus against a black backdrop above, where internal white streaks remain.

Even with just a single flower, so many variations can be achieved, by changing the number of exposures and the degree of movement – not to mention the background.  Then it is possible to merge different objects shot at different times – the computations are endless!