Edit: 2009/01/30, evening. After much searching I relocated an incredible site I had encountered before. Charles Krebs’ work is really, really, incredible. I was motivated to explore focus stacking after seeing image 29 in gallery 8, which I believe was produced with stacking. Dig around his page, it is really awesome.
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I ran into the technique of focus stacking not long ago, and have been itching to try it since. I haven’t found good subjects, but I took a first stab this morning. The results of some of workers with this technique are absolutely mind-blowing. For some of my favorite work on the net, see http://www.janrik.net/insects/ExtendedDOF/. My example is of a small natural turquoise from a local mine. I used very poor stabilization, and I believe that has resulted in the artifacts at the far edge of the stacked frame. Nevertheless, this is very promising. Now if I can just find some interesting subjects.
My shooting setup for this, by the way, is crapulent to high orders. I use a bucket on a trashcan in the sun as a sort of lightbox, and a precarious tripod to shoot. The tripod was the source of my instability issues, but the trashcan certainly didn’t help. The bucket is not quite as good as the Lambertian integrating sphere I’d like, but it is rather more affordable.
