Comment on Baby sized bolete of some sort
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
What’s a focus stack? Artificially increasing the depth of field to span the subject?
Comment on Baby sized bolete of some sort
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
What’s a focus stack? Artificially increasing the depth of field to span the subject?
flora_explora@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
Not artificially, but by taking many photos of differing depths and computationally stitching them together. Various cameras have the in-build ability to automatically take many pictures in sequence with a variable amount of depth (which in itself is calles focus bracketing). And there is software especially designed to then compute a single photo with increased depth of field from a stack.
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
That’s a valid technique and yet I’d call it artificial because there is no lens that produces this image. Heck, I’d even call the simple trick of a white sheet to add soft light from the underside artificial.
Sal@mander.xyz 4 weeks ago
I understand where you are coming from, but I think that - perhaps without realizing it - you are using a definition of ‘artificial’ that practically categorizes all photography as ‘artificial’.
For example: Camera sensors and also the older types of photographic film usually do not discriminate color directly. Techniques are used to combine multiple layers of color data together in order to replicate colors as we see them. Inside of modern a digital camera, for example, this is generally done my using a variable color filter grid on top of a monocromatic pixel array and then applying an algorithm to smooth out color data. Many camera users today may completely oblivious to this kind of processing, but the camera is making a lot of different choices for them and performing different kinds of processing. There are also other built-in features to removing aliasing, optical aberrations, color correction, etc…
Old school photographers would also need to combine filters or different material films together to create color renditions. It is just that, today, the camera does it for us. But photography is actually all about these ‘artificial’ methods to capture an image.
Focus stacking is a technique in which one expands the range of an optical system by capturing multiple slices and combining them optically together to recreate a larger depth of field. This is technical photography.
So, when you call this ‘artificial’, well… The act of projecting an image into some kind of film and then somehow preserving that image either directly on the film or as a digital representation is an artificial process. All photography is artificial.
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
The processes such as colorspace conversion that a well-calibrated camera uses by default are to make its images closer to the natural ideal of what an image should be based on human vision. It’s worse in some ways (dynamic range) and better in others (telephoto resolution). I get why you wouldn’t consider focus stacking artificial because it’s effectively simulating what our brain does automatically, but it’s intentional photo manipulation like the old technique of dodging and burning.