DOF Vs. Focus Stacking?

[Overread]

It's important to bring this into perspective and realise that photography is a medium not a method.


That is to say that its like paints or sketches or diagrams or anything else.
It's a medium which can be used for a mind boggling number of variations for an even more mind boggling number of creative products. Some will be almost record level; others at the other extreme parts of a collage.

So you can't really stand up and say that any one method is right or wrong or better or worse. Indeed most of these discussions boil down to "this is how I like to do it/wish to do it/how my inspirations do it".

I think you can only start to come to methods or ways if you start to put down stipulations first. Eg for reporting style photos - then you can start to have some meaningful discussion on creative choice and appropriate methods. Otherwise its a horrible mishmash of veiwpoints from so many different approaches that it just ends up a mess of opinion with no real grounding.

 

[unpopular]

Interestingly, where I used to follow the common philosophy of exposing for the shadows and processing for the highlights (not to lose shadow detail), digital has caused a complete reversal. I now expose for the highlights and process for the shadows (preserving highlight detail). What goes around . . .

Yes, I accidentally edited out that point. It is reverse. With digital zone system you expose for the hilights and process for the shadows.

The way I think of this is that by setting the exposure to just under the specular anything that clips out on the left side of the histogram could never be captured without clipping out the right side of the histogram, and because generally speaking the important stuff in a scene isn't in the deep shadow and because our eye is drawn to lighter parts of the scene and because there is no rolloff, we want to make sure we maintain integrity in everything brighter than whatever that minimum is.

And the rolloff issue is pretty big too. If there is no true specular I'll try to get all the hilights at zone IX or lower so I can add rolloff. In the majority of situations, this is how I work, I try to find the brightest region and place at the outer-most exposure.

 

[bluewanders]

I think it is important to note that around the time photography became a "thing" the world of the painter started to shift dramatically. Photographs were able to capture and record the visual world with greater accuracy and because of this many painters began exploring much more abstract avenues of self expression. And there were plenty of people painters and non painters alike who didn't like the shift.

The same can be said for film and digital photography I think. As we move further into the digital age and cgi becomes more powerful.. A photographer of his/her times is going to be one who embraces the shift and explores the unreality of photography... We've had decades of exploring the reality.

We know there are things that seem to be universally pleasant in an image... Artists have been building that store of classical knowledge for generations. Posing, lighting, shadows, gesture, ratios... On and on in an eon of iterative advancement. The challenge, from the "of their times" perspective is not in replicating the past, but rather in crafting the future. What universally pleasant things haven't we found yet? What else works? What's the next step?

Rome is the mob... Fickle and bored. What will you do the day you realize you are no longer culturally relevant? When the product you are creating is outdated and outmoded? If you don't have your finger on the pulse of the society around you and you openly criticize where the society is taking the medium, how do you expect to continue selling to them? How do you expect to grow when you speak in definitives about a medium that isn't even fully born yet?

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[greybeard]

Interestingly, where I used to follow the common philosophy of exposing for the shadows and processing for the highlights (so as not to lose shadow detail), digital has caused a complete reversal. I now expose for the highlights and process for the shadows (preserving highlight detail). What goes around . . .

Exactly the way we had to expose for transparencies. Expose for highlights and hope the shadows held up. With modern digital you can bring up the shadows in post processing but, if the highlights are blown out there is nothing you can do.

 

[Derrel]

I find it interesting that so many people want to use focus stacking to "edit away" one of the biggest photographic signatures: the idea of an out of focus area in a photo; the idea that a camera and a lens can capture only "so much" within a depth of field band; there's this newly-created method, that of focus-stacking, and so many people are using it to transform the photographic process and the "signature" of lenses on subjects, into this computerized, idealized "uber-focused" type of imagery...using a methodology as if it were yet anohther Insta-Creative Tool, you know, like the 10-stop Neutral Density filter crowd loves to do....creativity via the Big Stopper...and loooooong exposures.

I find those who espouse a strong, vehement insistence on using the method of focus stacking to be reminiscent of the misguided, preachy,dogmatic A-hole-ism of Ansel Adamas and his ilk, as they ruined photography for several decades, and stifled creativity and innovation in photography by elevating a cannard to a so-called truth: that photos are supposed to be sharp, and clear, and to glorify everything shown in them.

The idea that "everythin must be in good focus, and SHARP!" was part of the Ggroup f/64 bullsh*+...the kind of idea that Ansel Adams tried to force onto an entiure generation of people. Do a day's woerth of research on Adams, and his hatred and personal, and professional attacks on Andrew Mortenson, and you will never, ever look at Ansel Adams as a positive influence again. The guy was a rogal azzhole, and a disgraceful man who doggedly tried to poison the reputation of one of the greatest Impressionist photographers the world hads ever known: all in the name of the Group f/64 idea that EVERYTHING needed to be as clear, and sharp, and as focused as possible.

 

[unpopular]

Interestingly, where I used to follow the common philosophy of exposing for the shadows and processing for the highlights (so as not to lose shadow detail), digital has caused a complete reversal. I now expose for the highlights and process for the shadows (preserving highlight detail). What goes around . . .

Exactly the way we had to expose for transparencies. Expose for highlights and hope the shadows held up. With modern digital you can bring up the shadows in post processing but, if the highlights are blown out there is nothing you can do.

The point I'm advocating is to bring DOWN the shadows whenever possible. Pushing anything should always be avoided, except in some low contrast situations where you want to push the hilights up a bit to avoid a drastic pull on the shadows.

But the problem is how raw files are processed. There is PLENTY of latitude on the right if you can expose for it and compensate in processing.

 

[unpopular]

The idea that "everythin must be in good focus, and SHARP!" was part of the Ggroup f/64 bullsh*+...the kind of idea that Ansel Adams tried to force onto an entiure generation of people. Do a day's woerth of research on Adams, and his hatred and personal, and professional attacks on Andrew Mortenson, and you will never, ever look at Ansel Adams as a positive influence again. The guy was a rogal azzhole, and a disgraceful man who doggedly tried to poison the reputation of one of the greatest Impressionist photographers the world hads ever known: all in the name of the Group f/64 idea that EVERYTHING needed to be as clear, and sharp, and as focused as possible.

I hate adams as much as the next guy that hates adams, f/64 were a bunch of hypocritical, pretentious celebrity photographers whose approach was contrived, stuffy and pretty much represents everything i dislike about Modernism as a whole.

But I don't think you can really say that Adams wasn't a positive influence, at least not on the technical front.

 

[Derrel]

Expose to the Right (ETTR) made sense back in 2001-2008....but now with much better sensor technology, better signal proicessing in-camera, better in-camera electronics, and better software, ETTR seems really quaint to me!

Anybody who has shot a Sony EXMOR sensor camera knows that it is NO LONGER necessary to expose the crap out of digital shadows: we can now EASILYa do 4,and even 5-stop UNDER-exposures, and "lift" the shadows in softeware, and make great images. ETTR would make such a common methodoligy into a heretical-level crime! ERxpose to The Right is basically, dead for Sony,Pentax,Nikon,and Hasselblad camera users, and a few others. Meanwhile...the Kwannon set continues ETTR'ing....

 

[unpopular]

ETTR always makes *sense* - more exposure will always result in greater signal. Whether it's worth doing is another question.

I'll admit, I hardly ever do it with my x-trans and EVFs discourage it in practice.

 

[unpopular]

(though, some of this too is that the X-E1's meter only reads out +2EV, which makes it kind of awkward to properly meter for the hilights)

 

[Derrel]

Adams was a technician of high order, but his insistence on rendering things sharply, and clearly, and his influence were overall a huige Net Minus for creativity, expression, and experimentation, and he set photography as a creative, artistic medium back decades.

The idea that photography is only good for clear,sharp, idealized images of nature is a facile concept, and Ansel Adams was a master of that idea. His influence set photography as an artistic form back decades. His paitn-by-numbers and pretty scenes of American Grandeur were a throwback to earlier landscapers. Getting fixated on Yosemite was a good example of tunnel vision, as was the Group f/64 association. I judge him by the company he kept, and by his personal, decades-lng vendetta against impressionist photography.

If his photo fixation and narrow-mindedness had been directed at, say groups of people, he would have made a classic anti-Semite, or classic pro-Marxist radical. The guy had **** for brains in terms of what he thought was "worthwhile" to do with a camera. That's why his work had so little growth over decades. Same old sh*+_,over and over, and over. He despised the work of anybody who thought differently than he did. He was, ultimately, a narrow-minded old coot who did the same schtick for his entire career. But, yeah...a great darkroom printer, and a great technician. Sure. But his dogmatic attirtude was, as I said, a net negative for the field of photography. I am glad thatso many younmger people have no idea what kind of crap he espoused.

 

[Murray Bloom]

Derrel, I completely agree with what you wrote about Adams. However, you have to consider that he brought an entirely new level of appreciation to photography among the populace in general.

By striving for universal sharpness at times (and not at others), I feel that I'm giving the viewer more opportunity to explore an image. I can't count the number of times that I've viewed a photograph only to discover that an interesting area was outside of the chosen depth of field. I suppose that this is a result of the photographer's choices, but it can be frustrating, nonetheless.

 

[Derrel]

It's GREAT to see you back, Murray Bloom! Long time, no see!

 

[Murray Bloom]

Thanks, Derrel! I have to stop by from time to time to preach my gospel of image quality. LOL

. . . even when nobody wants it.

 

[Overread]

I'd bet money if instead of landscapes we were talking about macro and the use of focus stacking this thread would have been 2 maybe 3 pages at most and we'd not have had the huge meta-debate on the creative aspects of photography.

To my eye its an interesting display of dogma thinking whereby certain methods are valid within certain situations and bringing those methods into other areas meets resistance.

Photography can give selective focus - it can give hyper focal depth of field - it can today give practical focus stacking for the average person (you could do it in the past too - but it would take freakishly long and require a lot of work). No one of those methods is better or worse; no one is editing away a strength or doing something wrong or anything like that. It's just different approaches.

Just the very same way that one can use very thin depths of field deliberately with macro instead of the small apertures and deeper depth of field. We should always embrace thinking that is not standard but capable of producing valid results.