Focus Stacking Enthusiast Combines 847 Images Into Single Photo That Looks Exactly Like One Good Photo

Macro photography enthusiast Douglas Bellows has completed what he describes as 'the most technically demanding focus stack of my career' — an 847-image composite of a ladybug on a blade of grass that independent viewers have unanimously described as 'a nice photo of a ladybug on a blade of grass.' Bellows, who spent four hours shooting and twelve hours processing the image using Helicon Focus Pro, explained that the stack captures every plane of focus from the tip of the grass blade to the ladybug's posterior elytra, achieving what he called 'complete depth of field across approximately 8 millimeters of subject depth at 5:1 reproduction ratio.' 'Each individual frame has a depth of field of roughly 9 microns,' Bellows said, pulling up his Lightroom catalog to show the raw files. 'That's thinner than a human hair. To get everything sharp, you need hundreds of slices. I took 847 to be safe.' When shown the final composite alongside a single well-focused photograph of a similar ladybug taken with a smartphone by his wife, Bellows acknowledged that 'to the untrained eye, they may appear similar.' 'But look at the tarsal claws,' he said, zooming in to 400 percent. 'In my image, you can see individual setae on the terminal tarsomere. In her phone photo, the tarsal claws are...' He paused. 'Also pretty sharp, actually. Phone cameras have gotten annoyingly good.' Bellows's wife, Denise, offered her assessment: 'He spent sixteen hours on a photo of a bug. My phone took a better one in the time it takes to sneeze. But I love him, so I told him the setae thing is very impressive, which it probably is if you know what setae are.' Bellows has begun his next project, a 1,200-frame stack of a single grain of rice, which he expects will be 'transformative.'