I have been taking a lot of macro and stacked focus macro images the last couple months and taking advantage of some new equipment from Edelkrone for a few macro spin & zoom music video clips.
I was very honored to be featured by one of my favorite photography websites and magazines: PetaPixel Magazine: Meet the Photographer Carving out a Niche in Cannabis.
Here are some of the live plant cuttings and dried flower macro images:
As I mentioned these are focused stacked images, meaning they are composites of 20-30 individual images that are then combined together and super cropped so you can see most everything in focus. Standard macro images have incredibly shallow depth of field so even if you shot @ a very high aperture you'd only get a tiny slice in focus, the focus stacking technique is able to overcome this limitation as you can clearly see.
I used my fully manual Laowa 100mm f2.8 2x Macro Prime lens, this lens is incredibly tack sharp and a worthy investment.
Here are two of the macro spin & zoom video clips from the four video series, please watch full-screen for the full on effect:
This is for Alt-Sol Cannabis Cherry Diesel Strain, one very badass plant as you can see for yourself. I shot this vertically with my cinema rig @ 4k 60fps @ f11 to get more in focus, as the shutter speed and aperture were high I had to use powerful lights close up. I used two Godox vl150's at nearly full power to get the look I wanted. My new Edelkrone motion system as well as the cutting was the star of the show here, allowing me to do push ins, pans and zooms relatively easy with their app based control panel that gives you total control.
For the video I used my Sony 90mm f2.8 Macro G OSS lens, which is my workhorse glass.
I combined the 4k video with quick transitions into 14k macro images that allowed for some pretty epic pan and zooms in Final Cut Pro all the way down to the single individual trichome in the Bruce Banner video below.
The concept of the video was to start with a shot of the plant spinning, wide angled so you can see the whole cutting, then jump cut to ever closer shots using push ins, pan zooms to focus on the intact trichomes that are HIGHLY prized among connoisseur cannabis brands and aficionados everywhere. The crunchy alt-rock guitars are on brand for Alt-Sol Cannabis.
This is the video clip for Bruce Banner, again shot @ 4k 60fps @ f11, this was the first of the batch and one of my favorites overall.
If you want to check out all the macro spin & zoom video clips they are HERE
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