Macro photography is not at all what I thought it was.
I have a good macro lens and for a long time it really defeated my anti-RTFM approach to learning photography. (Read the Fucking Manual). I just dove in and treated like a lens that could shoot things up close.
So unless I was shooting something where everything was in the same focal plane, I got really sharp distinctions between what was in focus and what wasn’t. For flowers especially, that just did not work most of the time because mostly they don’t present as a flat subject where you can align all of one kind of structure at one focal point and have it recede into out-of-focus in a way that is visually pleasing.
So I had to learn how to stack images. What this entails is taking multiple shots of the exact same compositional frame while changing the focus point and then using Photoshop or other software to combine all the shots into one. To do it really well, you have to use a focus rail for great precision, but at the very least, you need a tripod. If you’re shooting outside, you also simply have to have a calm day. Wind makes macro shooting incredibly difficult unless you’re consciously trying to experiment with superimposition.
I half-ass the focus manually when I do this and that leads to some pretty bad misses sometimes where I have two or three planes of sharpness and then an out-of-focus blur in between them. But a focus rail seems like too much of a hassle for me, so I’ll settle for what I get. In some cases, I do get superimposition—the wasp in this shot is just one wasp that was at different points on the flower as I shot, which I felt was a really cool effect that made me happy.
Focus stacking I think conceptually was what opened me up to a vast domain of visual possibilities that I still haven’t really cracked into with my existing catalog of shots in Lightroom and that I still haven’t really pursued as a premise of new images. Just looking at the stacked macros that I have made makes me want to do more, at any rate.