Increasing depth of field

Or: The miracles of digital photography

The above simple rules apply to any kind of photography. Digital photography offers us many new and unthought of possibilities. One of them is combining photo's to artificially increase the depth of field thereby superseding all laws of physics and optics.
Take a photo of a Y3 and you'll find it isn't completely in the depth of field area. You'll have a hard time positioning it in this area. Well, the following trick is available. Take a number of photo's with the focuspoint gradually moving backward (see the four photos below)

Focus on the smokebox

Focus on second cylinder set

Focus on the firebox

Focus on the tender

You can combine these photos with Combine ZM (also visit the Yahoo group). Working with this software is astonishingly simple. Sofar I used only four commands:

• File / New to get the files to stack
• Macro / Do stack to actually stack the photo's. The macro extracts the sharp part and en recombines them to one new photos, clear out the mess and shows the result. Sometimes there messy colors but usually the results are great
• Press A to change the selection untill the blurred edges are deselected
• File / Save rectangle as...

It works just great. Combining the above photo's will get you this result::

Not yet perfect because I took the photo's in too few steps, the result is nevertheless astonishing.