Royal Doulton Figurines - Focus Stacked by Steve Beckelhimer

After a visit to the CREATE Lab in October 2011 and meeting with Fine Fellow, Dr. Richard Palmer, the Huntington High School GigaPan team was inspired to experiment with focus stacking, especially for macro images.
This photo is a stacking of three sets of twenty images (5 X 4) that were shot to focus on each row of figurines. The stacks were merged with Zerene Stacker (Version 1.04 Build T201110101145) then stitched with GigaPan Stitch (Version 1.0.0805). Images were taken with a Canon Powershot SX-20 IS mounted on a GigaPan EPIC 100. The camera was in manual exposure mode with a shutter speed of 1/15 seconds and an aperture of 5.7 (the maximum aperture at the focal length of 558.5 mm). The camera was set to manual focus and had the white balance set to daylight since diffuse lighting from a nearby window was used. The camera was set to 200 ISO. No exposure set was made of the background since it was a distraction to the content of the figurines. The GigaPan EPIC 100 had a field of view of 1.1 X 0.6 degrees, was set to a five second photo interval and used a short button hold (to avoid having the camera revert to auto focus).
Additional GigaPan images of this same setup are posted to allow comparison of focus stacked images to shots made set to a fixed focus. Viewers are urged to compare the GigaPan images of single focal plane and focus stacked images to compare techniques.
The subject of the GigaPan image is a set of Royal Doulton character figurines of King Henry VIII and his wives. These miniature character jugs are about 2.5 inches tall and were issued by Royal Doulton in the early 1980s.
This project is part of a joint project between the June Harless Center at Marshall University and the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University and is funded, in part, by a grant from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation. Additional support is from the Appalachian Math Science Partnership funded by the National Science Foundation.