OK, so not really making money, but I've found another thing that doesn't mind being photographed. Coinage. In fact I've found money to be something totally devoid of feelings or morality or ethics, which I'm quite grateful for given how much I have abused it over the years.
However this is a little post to demonstrate progress, or better still How Not To Learn To Do Something. Take me into a shop, where I can't find what I want, supermarket, clothes shop, camera shop selling millions of tiny and very specific accessories, do I ask for help? No, absolutely not. I am unable to do this. I will quite happily, or unhappily, wander round the shop constructing a complex catalogue of everything irrelevant they sell, in the hope that I will chance across what I'm looking for. Don't ask me why, some childhood traumatic experience relating to abandonment maybe.
So it is with my progress in learning how to use new computer software like Photoshop. Do I book myself on a course? No. I skulk around Youtube watching various small and perfectly formed videos and attempt to piece it all together in my own head.
So it was with learning how to produce photos that were entirely in focus from the front to the back. This is something that can be difficult in everything but the most wide-angle shot, where you can sometimes set the focus point to near infinity and pretty much the whole picture is in focus. Mostly with everything else, part of the photo will be out of focus. It also comes up in macro photography where the bit of the picture that is in focus (depth of field) is so narrow, it literally doesn't even cover the width of an insect.
Excellent example of a narrow depth of field - fly eyes bang in focus, rest of fly not - and you can see a 'stripe' of leaf in focus that also demonstrates it
There are photographic ways around this of course, there is a sort of triangular relationship between the shutter speed (slower speed lets in more light), the aperture (smaller apertures give better depth of field but let in less light) and the ISO (film speed, how sensitive it is to light), and you can mess about with these three - or alternatively you can just flood it with arc lights, but macro photographers tend to frown at this because you're supposed to be photographing the insect, not frying it.
However, one way to do it, is the ubiquitous 'stacking' technique - used for different reasons in astrophotography, but in macro photography, you can simply take lots of pictures, with slightly different focus points and blend them together. It's got to be the same broad image to be able to stack them, so it is impossible to do in the field, and that brings us to the other no-no in macro photography; it's not considered the done thing to photograph dead bugs, put simply.
You could glue one on a stick and take hours photographing every micromillimetre of it, but it wouldn't be accepted among your photographic peers. I have done it once with a dead butterfly I found, and I have to say, I felt spiritually soiled afterwards and I never shared it...
So we come to the bit about Learning How To Do Stuff. I found a youtube video which talked about some basic photostacking techniques you could use for landscape photography. You load all the pictures up, put masks on them (no I don't know why either) and then paint out the bits that aren't in focus.
So this first picture, is an example of a penny. Or rather it's 11p. It is 11 photographs of a penny, photographed with different focus points, and painstakingly blended together by hand, using a mouse, and leaving me with a slightly more frozen shoulder and slightly worse eyesight, as well as several unproductive hours older. However it looks quite good, I think.
So, I have done many photos this way. And quite by chance, the other week, I discovered that you can load the lot into Photoshop, and press the 'AutoBlend' button, and it does it all for you.
Second attempt, using More Money is below.
Both photographs taken with Sigma 150mm macro, first shot taken with Canon 70D, second with Canon 5DSr. Tiny dents in the £1 coin on the left probably due to Sookie, my dog, trying to eat it.
First photograph, 5 minutes taking the pictures, 2 hours editing it.
Second photograph, 5 minutes taking the pictures, 5 minutes editing it. To be fair, 4 of those minutes were spent with my computer going 'AAAAARRRGGGGHHHH what the hell are you expecting me to do with this lot????' The working file size was 254Mb, or, put it another way, 8,000 times larger than the memory held by the Apollo Command Module used in the first moon landing.
Progress. Very slow progress. But at least I didn't bother anyone...