Episode 004: Photowalks! The What's and Why's

In this week’s episode of The Shutter Button Podcast, I talk about the benefits of photowalks, why you should practice going on them, and also some of my experiences and the lessons I’ve learned when shooting my own work. Enjoy and, as always, thanks for listening!

Episode 007: The Dangers of Burnout and Identifying the Symptoms of a "Hustling" Artist

In this week’s episode of The Shutter Button Podcast, I talk about burnout and how to both identify, approach, and handle burnout as an artist and professional. I talk about some of the tools I use to handle burnout in the past and some of the identifying symptoms that I think many artists and professionals brush aside far too easily. Enjoy and, as always, thanks for listening!

A Short Introduction to Focus Stacking

Hey everybody! Zig here!

Today I’d like to showcase an image I took on my recent trip to Mianus River Park and talk a bit about my process of retouching and focus stacking when shooting macro photography. It all starts out with a series of images and in this case, it’s a series of photographs I captured of a mushroom which I found growing on the side of a fallen log. Take a look at the images and notice how each has a different portion of the mushroom in focus, starting from the foremost edge of the mushroom and moving all the way to the back.

To capture these, I mounted my Nikon Z6 on a tripod, composited the image, and then used the “Focus Shift” feature that is built into the Nikon Z6. The way that focus stacking works is that focus on the foremost part of the object you want to photograph, take a photo, move the focus towards to the back while overlapping your first photograph slightly, and then repeating the process until you have captured enough “slices” that each contain a different piece of focus for the target image. The focus shift feature in the Nikon Z6 automates this process and made it very quick and easy to get the results that I wanted.

After I’ve taken the photos, I import everything into Lightroom and make all my processing adjustments to every image in the stack before exporting the full-sized JPEG files and opening them in Photoshop. What I specifically do is open the first image in the stack in Photoshop and then import and rasterize every other image in the stack into that same session. At this point, my layers look a bit like this;

After this step, I select every layer in the layers tab and click on Edit > Auto-Align Layers and then choose to let Photoshop decide on the best way to automatically align them.

Once Photoshop aligns every layer, I then go in and make any additional adjustments like the selective removal of focus from some of the layers or, if there are many images in the stack, more extremely out-of-focus areas to prevent potential ghosting when I merge everything in the next step. After I’m content with the layers in the stack, I then click Edit > Auto-Blend Layers and let Photoshop automatically merge everything together. The final image looks like this, with the expected result being that everything is in focus.

This is a bit of a simplified breakdown of my process, but I hope that it gives the structure you would need to be able to repeat a similar process or implement it into your own workflow. I am always adjusting and improving the process as I learn some of the pit-falls of shooting macro photography and I am always open to hearing suggestions about how you might change or alter this style of processing and stacking!

I’ve only recently started to integrate this technique into my routine and I’ve already seen examples of photos where I would not want to keep everything in focus. However I think that focus stacking, and practicing taking multiple images with different depths of field, allows me to have the freedom and control I’m looking to get with my macro photography. It helps me capture the crisp, sharp edges that I like, as well as selectively keep things out-of-focus when I want to. Anyway, that’s all I have for today. I hope you have a great week shooting and I also hope that I was able to give a little insight into how I produce some of my macro images. I’ll see you all next week in another episode of the Shutter Button Podcast where I’ll be talking about formal education vs. deliberate practice, and my experience with finding a balance between both.

Thanks and all the best,

- Zig

A Brief Photowalk Through Mianus River State Park

Hey everyone, Zig here back with another post!

Today I wanted to share an experience I had over the weekend during my first visit to Mianus River State Park in North Stamford, Connecticut. It’s a lovely place that I’ve always wanted to visit, but for some reason thought it was too far out of my range for a day trip, but as it turns out, it’s much, much closer than I realized! I spent Saturday afternoon walking through the trails in the lower half of the park, practicing my macro photography, and getting in a little late-Winter exercise, as well.

I started off the visit by spending some time around the entrance to the park, which is, in essence, just a small bridge that crosses over the Mianus River into the trail area. I spotted a log along the shoreline with some life burgeoning off of it, and seeing how the light of the sun was giving some great warm tones, I decided to climb down near the water line to get some shots.

In the moment, I was enjoying the sound and the movement of the flowing water compared to this log that was just sitting stationary in the riverbed. The wind was blowing, but not harshly, and seeing this little microcosm of moss and other small plants living it up in the middle of winter gave me hope for the rest of the day.

Soon after, I was on my way along the River Trail which follows the perimeter of the park and is paralleled by the Mianus River. All along the trail, you can spot fallen birch trees and branches, and as I got close to one in particular, I noticed it was sprouting some interesting looking fungi. Something about it reminded me of clamshells!

Walking further along the River Trail, I kept my eyes peeled for any signs of distinct color and contrast that I could composite some shots around, and without too much searching, I found a wonderful little leaf resting on the path in front of me. I knelt down and snapped a few shots of it just before the wind knocked it over! I felt like I got lucky and caught it just in time.

I spent the day practicing a technique used in macro photography called “focus stacking.” I practiced positioning myself in a stable way, compositing my shot, and then snapping the same image, but focusing at different points. The goal of this technique is to have a selection of images that you can stack in software like Photoshop to increase your depth of field more than what you could achieve with a single snap of the shutter. Throughout some of these photos, you might notice spots that are unusually out of focus, and this is most likely because of how I was positioned with I took the photo. Kneeling or squatting to take handheld photos of smaller objects on the ground can make it easy to change the perspective between each image, as well as miss shots that would help complete the stacked depth of field. One of the lessons I learned from this for next time is to work with a faster shutter speed, as well as to bring a tripod with me so that I am always controlling the perspective. One thing I’ll also be practicing with in the future is my camera’s focus-stacking mode, which does a lot of the manual work for me. With this new knowledge, I’m expecting even more technically impressive images from my next visit!

As I spent the remaining hours of my visit walking through the park, I was able to really settle into the hike and enjoy the sights and sounds of nature. I could hear the wind blowing through the empty trees, the sounds of melting streams and cracking ice, and I could really enjoy the tranquility brought on by the warmer tones of the late-afternoon sun. I took this final image as I was making my return back to the park’s entrance at the end of the day. It was more of a snapshot at the time, but it’s turned into one of my favorites from the entire visit. It’s aptly titled, “Leaves Under Log,” and I am incredibly happy with how it turned out. The combination of contrast, lighting, composition, and texture from the top-down angle is superb, and I’m looking forward to getting a similar look in photos to come!

I’d like to conclude this week’s post by making an invition to every photographer out there to explore their nearby state and national parks. I invite you to take some time to go out and, even if you don’t go to take photos, enjoy the park for all that it has to offer. I was surprised by how well-maintained and impressive Mianus River State Park’s trails were and I can see myself going in the future to just walk around and spend some time in nature. I especially can’t wait until the Spring and Summer to see it full of plant and wildlife!

Anyway, that’s all I have now. Stay tuned for another episode of the Shutter Button Podcast next week where I’ll be talking about photowalks as a general topic! I’ll probably talk about an upcoming trip of mine, as well as more about my experience at Mianus River Park in that episode.

So, until then, have a great week!

- Zig

2018: A Year of Growth!

Hey everybody, Zig here once again. I’m wishing you all a happy holiday season and a merry new year as we make our way into 2019.

This is a great time to look back at the year behind us and review how we’ve changed in both style and performance. I’ll be sharing a few photos I’ve taken this year (chronologically), a year which started with me receiving my Nikkor 105mm f2.8 macro lens!

To start things off, I wanted to share one of the first photos I took with my macro lens;

Stamford, CT

This is a photo of a completely out-of-focus jar of paintbrushes I had drying on my bookshelf. I spent a lot of the first few months of the year shooting things within arms-reach in my room since it was so easy to find simple subjects to play around with. These paintbrushes were also very important to me because I had very recently completed an introductory drawing and painting class at the New York Academy of Art. I learned quite a bit about the process of compositing a painting and also created something I was proud of and was able to hang on my kitchen wall!

This second photo is a bit more planned and processed and I think it definitely has inspired a ton of my photography this year;

New York, NY

This is a photograph I took on my very first outing to New York City with my new macro lens. I spent most of that day photographing everything that felt even a little bit industrial or grungy; metal scaffolding, the sidewalks, building corners, and so much more. I walked away with this as one of my favorite shots of that day, I think what I love most about this photo in particular isn’t the color that I added in post, but the texture! The rust and chipped paint is so crisp in the focused section and I just love it. It makes me want to go back to this specific part of the city with a tripod and recreate this kind of photo with focus stacking to get more of the main subject in focus!

I credit these next photos with getting me interested in floral photography more deeply than I had before.

New York, NY

New York, NY

New York, NY

Although they may have all been taken on different days, these floral shots are some of my favorites and show some style development when it comes to my floral photography. Color and composition are something I’m always improving, but I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress this year. It’s not something I can practice in every season, but I’m looking forward to Spring and Summer to build an even bigger catalog of flower photos.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with one final shot that I’d like to use a benchmark for myself moving forward into 2019;

New York, NY

I took this photograph of some metal fencing on the High Line in NYC during a group photowalk at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo earlier this year. I got to participate in a fantastic group activity alongside a fairly large group of other macro photographers and I had a blast! It’s one of my photography highlights of the year and I definitely look forward to working alongside more photographers in 2019! I definitely feel like all of the work I did this year led up to me taking a shot like this and I really want to focus harder on preparing and executing on photos more deliberately next year. It’s one of the main things I’ll be working on, as well as several other things like focus stacking and videography.

Phew! Going over my old photos is definitely a little bit stressful, but it’s absolutely eye-opening to physically see the progress I’ve made personally and professionally this year. I’m very excited for what I’ll be doing in 2019 and I can’t wait to kick start the year with the release of the first episode of my upcoming podcast in late January: The Shutter Button Podcast. If you’re interested in learning about my approach to different professional experiences, then I invite you to listen to the show as it starts to get released next year, but in the meantime, I look forward to hearing about everyone’s 2019 plans!

Anyway, that’s all for now. I hope you all get to enjoy the holiday season and I’m wishing everyone a smooth transition into 2019.

All the best,

Zig