Stacking: Detail of a Japanese Anemone

I'm getting warm with a new bellows for macro photography. It's a nice Pentax Auto Bellows A that allows for moving either the lens with the front plate (all bellows allow for that) or the camera with its rear plate (a bit harder to find). The latter is very nice for stacking, because the perspective isn't influenced at all if you move the camera instead of the lens. The distance between the (unchanged) lens and the subject stays exactly the same all the time, so you do not incur the infamous stacking halos you are prone to get especially with detailed subjects with a lot of overlap.

There are also downsides: You loose resolution available for stacking moving the camera forward because the field of view widens considerably. And you have to look out for changes in exposure values; the less magnification you're at - moving the camera forward - the more light you get. So it's a bit tricky doing the stack with even exposures (you have to shorten exposure once in a while), but stacking the resulting pics afterwards is a delight - you don't have to deal with those stacking halos at all.

Here one of my first results of stacking with this new bellows showing lots of overlapping detail of a Japanese Anemone - 54 single pics were used. Uncropped, but downsized for viewing:

Especially if you look at a crop of the lower left quarter you see the potential this method has:

We're talking about 6x magnification here BTW, so the uncropped version - taken on an APS-C camera - shows a region about 3.5 mm wide. A quick shot with a ruler illustrates that:

Here's the ruler itself at max magnification:

And here two shots showing the extension of the bellows at the beginning of the stack:

And at the end:

Lens used was a manual Pentax SMC-M 3.5/28 mounted in reverse and stopped down to f5.6 - that f-stop gave the best results in a quick test run at different apertures. It pairs wonderful with the bellows - you don't have to use a reversing ring to mount it this way. You just remove the front plate of the bellows, reverse it and attach the bellows to the lens. You even get a 49mm thread on the back of the lens which can be used for hoods and lens caps (I screwed in a collapsible rubber hood for better protection of the backside of the lens).

Was a nice experiment, I have to say! The setup yielded nice enough results IMO, especially considering the cost for bellows and lens (both bought used, both in excellent condition) was around €130 together.

Phil

Edit: In the original version of this post the main picture had a flaw in the middle. I went through the stack, eliminated one mishappen pic and stacked everything new with better results this time. Since no-one had replied to this post yet I still could swap out the faulty one for the new version.