Focus Stacking Landscapes

At my photographic workshop a couple of weeks ago  I was introduced to the idea of focus stacking landscapes but did not have a chance to try the technique out before the workshop ended. It seemed an alien concept to me as I was thinking that you were likely get some blur in your images because of movement in aspects of the landscape but then I realised that focus stacking was only going to pick out the sharpest elements in all the images so if your shutter speed initially was sufficiently high to avoid motion blur you would not be seeing it in the final image. 

Over the years I have always tended to use my narrowest aperture  feasible in landscape photography so I can get the widest depth of field. However there is some degradation in the image when using these narrow apertures and if you have an element of foreground interest quite close to you it may be impossible to to get sharpness in your horizons at infinity.

Focus stacking means that you can use your lens at its optimum aperture, the so-called sweet spot (usually a couple of stops in from your widest aperture eg if that is f2.8 you would use f5.6.) and cover the overall depth of field by taking several images. You would then process these images in the computer using focus tacking techniques. This technique is made much easier if you have a camera that does automatic focus bracketing  as my fuji xt3 does. Ideally you need to do this on a tripod so your images align fairly easily but it may be possible for you to do it manually if you are using the electronic shutter as your images are then taken almost instantaneously.

To test out this technique in East Lothain I needed first of all to get to a high point and chose to climb up to the Hopetoun Monument. Ideally it would have been helpful to have a mountain range in the picture as that would give you plenty of scope in getting your farthest image element a long way off. However, since East Lothian is a relatively flat county this was not possible and my furthest point was Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh some thirty miles away but rather small in the viewfinder. That meant that my test shots had to be cropped to panoramic format to look at all interesting. You can check out my image by enlarging as much as possible on your screen