Suzanne Havens

I have a passion for making close-up photos of flowers.  The following are from the collection of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida.  These particular blooms are about one-quarter inch in size, so the photographs reveal more details than I can see in person.  

Because macro lenses are notorious for their shallow depth of field, i.e., they focus one very thin slice at a time. Therefore I use a technique called focus bracketing or focus stacking to allow us to see a much greater depth of field.  I make a large number of photos each focused slightly nearer to the subject (bracketing) then I stack them together in Adobe Photoshop and run a program that selects the most in-focus part of each photo and merges them into one.  Any movement of the flower will cause the merged photo to misalign and make an interesting abstract. The artist in me make like the abstract result, but the botanists may be frustrated.