Stephen Bay's Photography Blog

What I Learned From Painters as a Landscape Photographer

Although I am a photographer, I think it’s important to study the work of other visual artists especially those in different mediums. Painters, illustrators, graphic designers, collage, and other 2d artists often approach their work with a different mindset and I feel there is much that photographers can learn from them. In a painting, nothing is accidental and everything was the result of a conscious decision. Thus if you see a particular color treatment or composition you know that was because the painter deliberately decided to make it so.

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Semi-Automatic Focus Stacking on Sony Cameras

With today’s high resolution cameras, focus stacking is pretty much a necessity to get the maximum detail out of the sensor. Even with wide angle lenses, it is hard to get enough DOF to cover the foreground to the background and have everything sharp when viewed at 100% magnification. You could stop down to increase the DOF but this actually doesn’t work well with high megapixel sensors as exceeding even f/8 can result in a loss of resolution due to diffraction.

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Diffraction, Aperture, and High Megapixel Cameras

While I was out on my last shoot, I did a quick test to show the effects of diffraction on image sharpness. If you don’t know what diffraction is, here is the dictionary definition: Diffraction is the process by which a beam of light spreads out after passing through a narrow hole or across an edge. Practically what this means is that when you use physically smaller apertures, the light passing through the lens spreads out more.

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