This is the first project that really hit this blog and so it seemed like a good spot to do some experimenting. One of the biggest challenges with photographing miniatures is dealing with the depth of field. Miniatures have a certain look when photographed. Namely a small part will be in focus and most of the image is slightly out. This really characterises photographs of small things. In fact there’s a technique called miniaturisation where people take a picture of real life scenes and “miniaturise” them to make them look like they’re actually pictures of small scale models. Here’s an example I found on the web (sorry the owner doesn’t allow direct linking.)

Now, in the interest of improving the quality of my pictures I’ve done couple of things. First I’ve improved the lighting I’m using – proper lamps with diffusers (cheers to the wife for picking these up as a present) rather than whatever is around the house. Secondly I’m going to start playing with image stacking. Image stacking involves taking a series of images focusing on different part of the image. Some cleaver algorithms then put these together to create an image with a much larger depth of field.

You can use hundreds of images to get some spectacular results (some of the amazing pictures you see of really zoomed in insects are done like this). However, I’m just having a quick play so I threw together about 8 images to create the following.Here is the original image I uploaded all those months ago. Notice how the wings are out of focus in this image.I’m fairly happy with the result – it only took a few minutes and as a first test I think pretty successful. Also, because of the new lamps the colours are now spot on, something which I’ve been grappling with the old light setup.