Serendipity is often cited as a hallmark of discovery. I stumbled into a discovery using focus-stacking software. As abstraction has always been central to my work, I sought to learn macro photography. Like others, I used focus stacking to compensate for the shallow depth of field of a macro lens to create sharply detailed images.
However, I experienced failure after failure. A focus stacked image might be sharp nearly throughout with small blurry patches. At first, I attributed the failure to a beginner’s learning curve, it was, in part; however, it was also something else. Focus stacking software uses algorithms to align the focus-stacked images, but suffers from algorithmic limitations. I sought to exploit those limitations to create novel images, to “turn a bug into a feature.”
The images in this series are all focus stacked, composed in-camera with light post-processing. Without divulging the subject matter, the images in each series come from similar settings.
This technique yielded many strange, impressionistic images I had not imagined. I hope the viewer finds beauty in serendipity too.
