Still Life with Dental Floss test by Richard Palmer

10 focal planes combined with Helicon Focus.
The lens combo I used, a Sigma 55-200 (110-400 equiv.) and 25 mm extension tube, would not allow proper focus stacking at each position, due to the overall depth of field of the composition. Instead of focus stacking each frame, I took each focal plane. since I could not get the full depth using the manual focus ring, I changed the focal length to capture each focal plane. After stitching each focal plane, I aligned them the best I could as layers in Photoshop, cropped, and saved each layer as a separate file.

Original = ~250 Mpixels after alignment and cropping - downsized to 60 Mpixels
The larger files crashed Helicon Focus

Not quite what I wanted, but cool nontheless.

Will try other methods to get what I'm after.