Experience

Yeah that would help, you can watch and read all the tutorials but if you don’t go out and practice you are never going to improve. With my experience level reaching 1 month I am actually happy with my progress. I think I am trying to learn so many different techniques at such a fast pace that there hasn’t been much time to focus just on one area. I believe once I develop a style, the level of my photography will rise exponentially as I will be fine tuning my skills in one area as opposed to trying to do it all. This was meant to be a focus stack, my first one. While it looks relatively in focus right through, if you zoom in some areas there are focal planes that are not in focus. Generally you can do this effectively with 3-4 images stacked on top of each other but because I was so close to the ground, my subject matter was very close to the lens requiring me to add in a few extra frames. Even with a small aperture of f 11 @ 24mm the depth of field right up close to the camera was only 4mm. Alternatively if my closest subject was a meter away at these settings, I could have gotten away with just one shot negating the need for stacking. How do I know this? Photopills app, it’s very useful for multiple areas of photography and I would highly recommend you go check it out. One last lesson from today was that if you plan to focus stack, try choose subject matter that doesn’t move, leaves moving in the wind for instance wasn’t my wisest choice, as once you stack the images in post you get a blur effect as the leaves are not in the exact same position in each exposure.