I’ve been doing some product photography and needed to better understand macro and focus stacking techniques. The resulting photos are taken using a D300 and a 28-75 Tamron 2.8 Macro lens mounted on a tripod. The lighting setup is simple. One SB800 shot over the top of the pearls and bounced off of a white foam core board. To provide some fill, the camera is shooting directly through another piece of white foam core board. I cut a hole just large enough to get the lens through and then added the hood to hold the board in place.
The base in the first shot is a piece of black foam core the second on a piece of black velvet. Each photo required 5-7 individual shots to be combined to get full focus at that distance. Combining the files was done in Photoshop CS4 Extended. All shots were made in manual mode with the focus being manually advanced just slightly. To improve the photos more, I would have benefited from a focus slide rail.
