Flora
Portland, c.2017
One light.
Photographs were taken with an Olympus E-M5 II camera and a 60mm f/2.8 Macro lens stopped down to f/5.6 for sharpness. The "one light" was an old lamp that was gathering dust in the garage. Marketed as a Day-Light Sky Light the color temperature was measured by photographing a white balance reference card and was found to be 4300 K with a tint of 53 as indicated in Lightroom. Applying this result to the remaining images made a big difference in color accuracy.
For most pictures the camera was configured to shoot with Focus Bracketing turned on, Focus Differential 3, and the Number of Shots 20. This feature uses the electronic shutter to take a series of 20 images varying focus for each image. It assumes that the first shot is the closest and slowly focuses further away for each successive shot. The amount of change for each shot is determined by the Focus Differential and is adjustable from 1 to 10. The Differential takes into account distance, focal length, and aperture of the lens so that the amount of focus overlap is consistent regardless of these factors.
Images were imported into Lightroom and culled to select the ones that applied to the flower of interest. Typically 7–10 shots out of the 20 taken were used. Selected images were then exported to Zerene Stacker and blended to produce the final image. Nothing like specifying your depth of field during post-processing!