Colorado Photography by Chester Bullock

In reviewing George Barr’s “Take Your Photography to the Next Level”, I noticed two things. 1. George Barr stitches a lot of images together (a topic for another day) and 2. Mr. Barr uses Helicon Focus quite a bit.

Helicon Focus is designed (per their website) for:

• micro photography (camera + optical microscope)
• macro photography (camera + macro lenses )
• landscape photography (infinite depth of field)

I have only done a couple of tests with it so far (it rained here in Colorado most of the weekend), but I think a definitive one is illustrated below. I want to thank George Barr for bringing this tool to me eyes, and to Dan Kozub (in the Ukraine) for writing it. I am going to use it a lot when I do flower macros, etc.

My first attempt at doing a test didn’t come out so well (I didn’t even save the result). The primary reason? I was trying to do it handheld. You definitely want to use a tripod for this.

Since it was raining all weekend, I just set up my small tripod on the kitchen table and took some pics looking into my wife’s office. For this test, I snapped a total of five pictures, all in manual focus mode. Here is the first:
Notice that the computer monitor and other items are well out of focus in the background. Here is the relevant EXIF data:
Camera: Olympus E-510
Exposure: 0.2 sec (1/5)
Aperture: f/5.3
Focal Length: 34 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0/10 EV

Following this shot, I rotated the focus ring a little ways and snapped another. I did this 2 more times before taking this final shot (for a total of 5).
Notice that things in the background are in much better focus now. Here is the relevant EXIF data:
Camera: Olympus E-510
Exposure: 0.167 sec (1/6)
Aperture: f/5.3
Focal Length: 34 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0/10 EV

Obviously you can guarantee best results by being in full Manual mode and making sure the aperture and exposure are the same for each picture. Since this was a crude, last minute test, I didn’t go that far.

Here is the resulting image from a combination of the 5, using the default settings in Helicon Focus.

The difference is pretty obvious, and pretty striking as well. All told, it took about 20 minutes for the software to process the 5 Olympus RAW images (~8MB each) into the resulting image above. I can’t wait to get out in the field and try this on some flowers. Just make sure your objects are stationary. As you can tell from the Windows logo on the computer screen, EVERYTHING makes it into the final image.

For more information, or to purchase this software, go to http://www.heliconsoft.com/heliconfocus.html – you won’t be sorry you did.

Be aware that there is not much in the way of tutorial information. You really need to experiment with the program or look in the forums to get an idea of what you are doing. I figured out that I needed to shoot several images, and then simply loaded them in and let it do it’s thing. Very cool tool!