Close Up photography with the Landscape Bracketing Script

The Lua Landscape Bracketing Script that currently runs on the CHDK M3 and M10, was not written for macro photography. Having said that it can cover your 'close up' photography need by selecting the Min2X focus bracketing option. That is, from the camera's minimum focus to the currently focused point.

The test image I selected was an old wasps’ nest. I focused at the back of the nest, ie with a card, and shot at 18mm and at f/6.3.

The log file captured the following info:

Fri Jun 24 07:16:09 2022
Focus distance: 0
Diffraction Aware: 0
Overlap Blur: 15um
Assumed Pupil Mag: 1
FB #1 @ 150mm
FB #2 @ 159mm
FB #3 @ 172mm
FB #4 @ 188mm
FB #5 @ 208mm
FB #6 @ 237mm
FB #7 @ 279mm

Focus Distance = 0 tells me that I used the lower Canon focus distance, Diffraction Aware = 0 means I didn't have diffraction aware switch on (as this only comes into use when infinity focusing), the Overlap Blur = 15 micron is obvious, and I ignored Pupil Magnification in this run. 

After inspecting the images in Lightroom, as expected, the first few images (3) weren't needed for focus stacking.

After adjusting and syncing the exposure in Lightroom, I did a round trip to Helicon Focus with images 4 to 7.

After returning to Lightroom I cropped the image, straighten and toned it to arrive at the following test image.

For scale, the nest is about 180mm in diameter at the base.

So, there you have it, although the script is not designed for macro photography, it does a reasonable job if you wish to carry out some close up photography.

As usual I welcome any comments on this post or any of my blog posts.

Postscript

Here is another example of the wasps' nest, this one taken at 22mm, f/11 and with an overlap of 10 microns. The log file looked like this:

Fri Jun 24 10:09:55 2022
Focus distance: 0
Diffraction Aware: 0
Overlap Blur: 10um
Assumed Pupil Mag: 1
FB #1 @ 150mm
FB #2 @ 152mm
FB #3 @ 155mm
FB #4 @ 158mm
FB #5 @ 162mm
FB #6 @ 165mm
FB #7 @ 169mm
FB #8 @ 174mm
FB #9 @ 179mm
FB #10 @ 184mm
FB #11 @ 191mm
FB #12 @ 199mm
FB #13 @ 208mm
FB #14 @ 217mm
FB #15 @ 229mm
last image @ 240mm
Sky X

As you can see I threw in an ETTR sky bracket, just in case, but didn't need it in the end.