Cheating on a Wood Lily

Full disclosure. This is a composite image, an attempt at rudimentary focus stacking. Because of the shallow depth of field working with the RX10iv at 600mm and f4 for this telephoto macro, I could get the anthers and stigma in focus or the spotted surface of the petals in focus, but not both at the same time. Even stopping down for grater depth of field would not have gotten both critically sharp in the same image. So I came back with one of each…one image with the anthers and stigma in focus and one with the petals in focus. After my standard processing in Polarr, being careful to match the two images, I used Pixomatic to combine the two, laying the in focus anthers and stigma from one shot over the in focus petals from the other and then carefully erasing to expose the background image as needed. I am pretty happy with the result. I doubt, if I had not told you, that you would have noticed anything out of the ordinary about the image. 🙂 Sony RX10iv at 600mm equivalent. Macro mode (in Scene Modes). And here, just for those who might be interested, are the two shots that I combined. Is that cheating? I will leave that for you to decide.

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