This is another stack from the same trip to the zoo yesterday. I don't like it as a photo as well as the first, but it is more successful as a stacking exercise. This is the tail of an Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake. It's a crop of about 80% of the original shot, I cropped off the mirrored strip near the bottom, and cropped off a bit of the left edge because the lower left corner had a bit of the log that was too close to be in focus.
I started this out intending to go all the way to the furthest reaches in upper right corner, but the snake crawled away! Fortunately, this happened after I'd captured the foreground and the snake itself. I kept shooting, thinking I could still use the upper right corner, even if they didn't have the snake in them (depending on how smart Combine ZM was, I realized this might take some photoshop work). Unfortunately, when I examined the shot, I found that the snake had knocked the plant stem and leaves into a different position when he moved. Since the stem went behind the rattle of the snake, I gave up on trying to repair it, and just went with the soft background! There are some dynamic range problems here I didn't foresee.
Only glitches I see with this are that a small wedge-shaped thingy (not sure what it is!) below and to left of center wasn't really sharp. I selected it and boosted contrast and sharpening to improve it a bit. There are some strange wavy lines superimposed on the OOF bg near the upper right corner, I'm not sure what they are.
I've taken some landscape shots recently with the idea of using Combine ZM or Helicon focus to stack them for more DOF....I'll go back and look at those and see how this works next.
Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake
controlled situation
180mm macro lens
stack of 9 shots, 1/250th second @ f/16, iso 100
