Focus Stacking and a few moths

There were 5 moths of 5 species in the light trap this morning.  The 2 new moths for the year were, Rosy Dart (Diarsia rosaria) and Alfalfa Looper (Autographa californica).  I’ve been playing around with focus stacking for sometime now.  This is the process of combining multiple images with different focus points.  It’s not always easy as any movement of the moth between shots can effect the results and I’ve only ever attempted it on macro moths using a tripod and camera release.  I normally combine just 2 photographs.  One focused on the head and one on the legs.  It seems to work fairly well and give a depth of field that would otherwise be unobtainable (certainly with my macro lens).  There can be some softness on the background around the edges of the moth but the moth itself generally looks ok.  Anyway, I went a little further today and the side shot of the Alfalfa Looper below is actually the result of 5 photographs each focused on slightly different parts of the moth.  I think it looks ok, although, there was a fair bit of leaf softness around the edges of the moth, some of which I have corrected.  It’s unlikely that I’ll use this many images very often but I thought it was an interesting experiment.  Incidentally, I use Photoshop CS5 to combine the images.  The other photographs are also the result of focus stacking but with just 2 shots each this time.