Landscape Focus Stacking is Easy to Do
A hazy summer day at Round Valley Reservoir. The distant tower in the upper middle of the frame completes a clean, sharp foreground.
Landscape Rather than Macro
For landscape photography, focus stacking is easy to do. It yields sharp quality images that may surpass what you can achieve by narrowing the aperture for depth of field. Other applications of focus stacking are relatively difficult.
I say so because macro focus stacking of images of the likes of insects, lichens, and other small objects can involve from 13 to dozens of photos stacked to result in a completely focused image. I’m not very much aware of other difficult stacking methods, but my son piled on hundreds of photos to get an image of the Milky Way in the desert night. Landscape photography, however, is a different matter.
It usually requires taking four or five—sometimes three—photos to get a single image sharp from corner to corner and everywhere in between. You won’t likely get such crisp sharpness when shooting a single, comprehensive image at, say, f/13. That’s a great aperture to select for a comprehensively sharp landscape image with trees on the distant horizon, but it might not be optimal.
Your lens’s sweet spot—the f-stop that yields the lens’s best quality of sharpness—might be, for example, f/7.1. Whether you know the sweet spots of your lenses or not, you can select a more open f-stop, rather than a narrow one for depth of field, which will allow for greater lens sharpness. (Narrow aperture means light diffraction softens an image.) Two to three stops from wide open is best.
Let me get back to that word “optimal” for a moment, and point out that it has other meanings—such as what’s best for your storage needs. Four or five images that measure 70mb apiece begin to take up a lot of space on the hard drive. It all amounts to what you want to do, and I can promise you focus stacking is, at the least, an interesting method. You might find it fully worthwhile to incorporate into your shooting routine.
I bought an entire stand alone Affinity Photo program to post-process photo stacking, and I have very fond memories of stacking at Round Valley Reservoir when the water was low, allowing for unique landscape photography.
You can see the crisp focus at foreground’s edge, not so much in the snow, as in the rock near the right corner.
How to Do It
You can do it manually, but some cameras, like the Nikon D850, have in-camera programs that allow you take a series of photos focused from the edge of the foreground to infinity (or the most distant objects on the horizon). You select a differential that amounts to spacing between each image, and you select the number of those images the program will click automatically.
It’s not the purpose of this article to go into detail about how to do it in-camera. I gave up on doing it that way, finding it simpler not to have to rely on electronics. Doing it manually is more satisfying because you’re involved in doing the stacking, not electronics.
The photos must later be merged into one stacked image by a program like the one Affinity Photo offers or that Photoshop has.
The low water of Round Valley Reservoir produced unparalleled opportunities for focus stacking. Take advantage of the sun as it lowers on the horizon, as I did for this shot.
Whether you focus stack manually or in-camera, as you can see in the image above, results from landscape opportunities, such as the low water Round Valley Reservoir afforded, can feel repeatedly pleasing to view. They never grow old.
Begin with a good tripod. I bought a fairly expensive carbon Manfrotto in 2014 for about $350.00, and I’ve had no regrets. It works like new after countless uses. The carbon is relatively lightweight, and although it still manages to weigh about three pounds, it’s no beast to haul.
To do stacking optimally, you’ll want to lock down the ISO to the base native setting. Keep in mind, however, that many cameras have dual native ISO. I can set my Nikon D850’s ISO at 400 in Aperture Priority to take advantage of the dual native feature of its sensor—the camera’s electronics thus selecting a higher shutter speed—to deal with a breeze’s moving of any vegetation in the foreground.
I prefer, however, to set my ISO at the base native 64. The sensor is really good at compensating for ISO as high as 6400, but since I have the option of very low ISO, I take the advantage of that option whenever I can. You don’t have to be technical enough to understand camera sensors in all their detail to want to take advantage of the lowest base native ISO setting a camera offers.
Using Aperture Priority Mode, I select whatever aperture is near the sweet spot for my lens. You want the aperture to be no narrower than halfway to its narrowest setting. Two to three stops above wide open are good ones to try. The idea is to get maximum sharpness at each point the shutter clicks an image, from the foreground edge to the distant edge. Shutter speed will be compensated for automatically. You will try to get all your shots done before the light changes, if clouds overhead are any problem.
To stack manually, make sure to select manual focus both on the camera and on the lens. This is critical. You don’t want absent-mindedness to throw you for a loop. That’s because having one or the other setting on automatic might damage both lens and camera.
Select and lock-in that base native ISO, so long as the breeze isn’t bad. Sometimes a breeze will pause long enough for you get each shot. As I began to say in a previous paragraph, in Aperture Priority, select the lens’s sweet spot or experiment with different stackings at getting as close to that as you think you can get.
Begin by manually focusing the lens at the nearest foreground. Do this gingerly. You want the lens to take the same picture but at different focal ranges. Don’t change any settings. Just work your way—through anywhere between three and six images—from foreground to the greatest distance, getting the full range in complete focus.
Low-light, late in the day, but without the golden quality of a little later. High contrast works beautifully in this focus-stacked image that took advantage of bleached rocks formerly on the bottom of the reservoir some 23 feet down.
Merge the Images
As I said earlier, I’ve used Affinity Photo, though it’s been a couple of years now since I last used the device. Round Valley Reservoir has been at full pool, my landscape options limited. From what information I’ve gleaned online, though, Affinity Photo does a better job of merging photos than Photoshop.
I don’t remember offhand how to do it, but I certainly like to think that when I use the program again, It’ll jog my memory! I’m sure a cursory use of Google AI will tell anyone how. Whether you spring for Affinity Photo or use Photoshop, it can’t be very difficult to do.
All the best in your endeavor! I love to see others do good work, so if you have any of it online I can access, feel free to send me a comment and direct me to it.