Search found 54 matches

by pittendrigh
Thu Jul 07, 2022 6:11 am
Forum: Technical and Studio Photography -- Macro and Close-up
Topic: Stacking shiney plastic
Replies: 8
Views: 991

Re: Stacking shiney plastic

RE> blurred backgrounds I still have a lot to learn. Much of what I think I know may well be wrong. I do a lot with blurred backgrounds in Post Processing. Most users ply Adobe softwares. I use Darktable and Gimp mostly. Occasionally others. If I make studio macros with a blue or green background it...
by pittendrigh
Wed Jul 06, 2022 8:14 pm
Forum: Technical and Studio Photography -- Macro and Close-up
Topic: Stacking shiney plastic
Replies: 8
Views: 991

Re: Stacking shiney plastic

No I always use DMap, last few years anyway.

I'm not sure why the first attempts were so bad. The light tent made a huge difference, although I also shot that last one at F-16
I need to stick with one photo and work it all day. Until see from worst to best in all possible scenarios.
by pittendrigh
Wed Jul 06, 2022 3:48 pm
Forum: Technical and Studio Photography -- Macro and Close-up
Topic: Stacking shiney plastic
Replies: 8
Views: 991

Re: Stacking shiney plastic

Yes indeed. I got my old light tent out of a drawer and it helped a lot. I don't have a photo of my tent but it's basically synthetic curtain material from a sewing store, stretched over 1" inch diameter transparent plastic tubing (which makes a frame without casting shadows). Yours is an interestin...
by pittendrigh
Wed Jul 06, 2022 12:32 pm
Forum: Technical and Studio Photography -- Macro and Close-up
Topic: Stacking shiney plastic
Replies: 8
Views: 991

Re: Stacking shiney plastic

This was the lowest light setting on my strobes, bouncing off the ceiling. F-16 1/8 second ISO 6400 The high ISO makes it grainy but the narrow aperture seems to have reduced the fuzzy glare, which comes from the frames with least focus in the shiny parts. I tried editing the frames before the stack...
by pittendrigh
Wed Jul 06, 2022 8:54 am
Forum: Technical and Studio Photography -- Macro and Close-up
Topic: Stacking shiney plastic
Replies: 8
Views: 991

Stacking shiney plastic

I photograph insects and fishing flies. I use umbrella strobes, speed light flash and LCD accent lights. Insects I bring into the studio and then knock them out with ethyl acetate, so they don't move during a stack session. I use entangle, ZereneStacker, Darktable and Gimp on linux for all stacking ...
by pittendrigh
Sat Aug 07, 2021 6:25 pm
Forum: Technical and Studio Photography -- Macro and Close-up
Topic: Weird purple glare on black metal
Replies: 4
Views: 679

Re: Weird purple glare on black metal

On a hunch.....the halo-like background shadows above all appeared on the right side of the subject, as if a left side strobe was too bright. So I turned the left strobe down a bit and the right one up to a bit brighter. The halos were completely eliminated. The black jaws of the hook vise still had...
by pittendrigh
Sat Aug 07, 2021 3:58 pm
Forum: Technical and Studio Photography -- Macro and Close-up
Topic: Weird purple glare on black metal
Replies: 4
Views: 679

Re: Weird purple glare on black metal

Ok. I tried F5 instead of F8, made the stepping increment 1mm instead of 2 (so 32 exposures instead of 16) and moved the slave speedlight that was illuminating the semi-transparent background from behind so it illuminated the plastic background from the front. I still get some of the halo static aro...
by pittendrigh
Sat Aug 07, 2021 11:52 am
Forum: Technical and Studio Photography -- Macro and Close-up
Topic: Weird purple glare on black metal
Replies: 4
Views: 679

Weird purple glare on black metal

I've been away from photomacography for a year and a half. My synapses are gradually coming back into synchrony after a year and half bout with long Covid. I set up a shot this morning I've done a thousand times in the past but suddenly I'm not getting satisfactory results. This is a fishing fly in ...
by pittendrigh
Fri May 14, 2021 7:46 am
Forum: General Discussion Forum and Community Announcements
Topic: Strange ZereneStacker behavior darktable-cli output
Replies: 2
Views: 1345

Re: Strange ZereneStacker behavior darktable-cli output

Perhaps I found it. In the script loop above the business line ended with 2>/dev/null which suppresses error messages. When I take that away the loop produces an error message for each iteration of the loop: beignet-opencl-icd: no supported GPU found, this is probably the wrong opencl-icd package fo...
by pittendrigh
Fri May 14, 2021 7:42 am
Forum: General Discussion Forum and Community Announcements
Topic: Strange ZereneStacker behavior darktable-cli output
Replies: 2
Views: 1345

Strange ZereneStacker behavior darktable-cli output

I've been using ZereneStacker for quite a few years now. I stack (mostly) photos of fishing flies and the real insects the flies imitate. I might shoot a dozen or more exposures with a Cognisys Rail, using Nikon or Sony (NEF or ARW suffix) I convert the raws to *.tif in a bash loop. Bash scripting w...
by pittendrigh
Thu Apr 29, 2021 10:21 am
Forum: General Discussion Forum and Community Announcements
Topic: Stacking plus exposure blending -- seemed like a good idea
Replies: 2
Views: 1186

Re: Stacking plus exposure blending -- seemed like a good idea

Good answer. I'll work with all of that. Bracketed at each step might be a better direction for me. With big magnification on insects I might use 20 exposures, all the same lighting and exposure. This morning I was thinking about dabbling in commercial real estate photography--where indoor lighting ...
by pittendrigh
Thu Apr 29, 2021 8:22 am
Forum: General Discussion Forum and Community Announcements
Topic: Stacking plus exposure blending -- seemed like a good idea
Replies: 2
Views: 1186

Stacking plus exposure blending -- seemed like a good idea

An experiment occurred to me this morning, which did not work out well. But perhaps it might have If I had only known.........something. I set up what would have been a simple manual focus stack in my office, on a small tripod. I shot 4 focus resets for an object up close, for two intermediate dista...
by pittendrigh
Tue Jul 14, 2020 12:53 pm
Forum: Equipment Discussions
Topic: ZereneStacker default save format
Replies: 2
Views: 2101

Re: ZereneStacker default save format

Ooops. Not a Zerene problem. I must be getting old
by pittendrigh
Tue Jul 14, 2020 12:38 pm
Forum: Equipment Discussions
Topic: ZereneStacker default save format
Replies: 2
Views: 2101

ZereneStacker default save format

Is this the right forum for software hassles? I'm a ZereneStacker user and fan. I've had it running for many years. Suddenly my installation insists on reverting to "jpeg normal" for a save file format. It used to remember RAW. This could be a file permissions issue but everything I can find, like /...
by pittendrigh
Sun Dec 01, 2019 8:39 am
Forum: Nature Photography -- Macro and Close-up
Topic: Trout flies
Replies: 3
Views: 2024

Trout flies

We don't see many trout fly images here. They are one of my hobbies. Ephemerella Infrequens, known to fly fishermen as the Pale Morning Dun. Real and artificial--with the artificial as a dry fly that floats. The real ones are about 5/16" inch long (not counting tail fibers) or 8mm. Hend held with 10...