Monday, March 31, 2014

Mind Blowing Macro Underwater Time-Lapse ~ by Daniel Stoupin

Daniel Stoupin snapped 150,000 22-megapixel RAW exposures to make this stunning 4K masterpiece. Sadly we can only view it in 1080P but it will still wow you I promise.



" To make this little clip I took 150000 shots. Why so many? Because macro photography involves shallow depth of field. To extend it, I used focus stacking. Each frame of the video is actually a stack that consists of 3-12 shots where in-focus areas are merged. Just the intro and last scene are regular real-time footage. One frame required about 10 minutes of processing time (raw conversion + stacking). Unfortunately, the success rate was very low due to copious technical challenges and I spent almost 9 long months just to learn how to make these kinds of videos and understand how to work with these delicate creatures." ~ Daniel Stoupin


*WATCH IN FULL HD ~ FULL SCREEN*

Slow Life from Daniel Stoupin on Vimeo.
Daniel's Gear:
- Canon 7D (died at the beginning of the project as he had overused it in his research), Canon 5d MkIII (90% of footage was done with it)
- Canon MP-E 65 mm lens
- adjustable custom-spectrum lamps (3 different models)
- several motorized stages including StackShot for focus stacking
- multiple computers to process thousands of 22MP raw images and perform focus stacking (an old laptop died on that mission after 3 weeks of continuous processing).
Edited in Sony Vegas, Adobe Photoshop CS6...

What is stack focusing you ask? Focus stacking (also known as focal plane merging and z-stacking) is a digital image processing technique which combines multiple images taken at different focus distances to give a resulting image with a greater depth of field (DOF) than any of the individual source images

File:Focus stacking Tachinid fly.jpg
Series of images demonstrating a 6 image focus bracket of A Tachinid fly. First two images illustrate typical DOF of a single image while the third image is the composite of 6 images.

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