Once the rain storm cleared, the lighting in the garden was beautifully soft.
Because I was experimenting shooting the water drop, I took 2 shots on the tripod with different aperture settings and when I saw them downloaded I realised I wanted the blurred background from one, and parts of the drop from the other shot - so I had an unintended focus stacking exercise using 2 layers and a simple painted mask. It was kind of cool to 'paint in' the areas I wanted to take from one image into the other.
Lyn, this turned out rather well with the 2-shot stack. I last did some stacking experimenting in early Oct. Here is one I did after watching a Gavin Hoey video: http://365project.org/mikegifford/365/2012-10-05
@frida this was using PaintShop Pro - shallow DOF layer on top (f2.8) & I erased the parts (with a mask) where I wanted the lower image (which was about f6.3 ) to give more depth, otherwise it would have been only the foreground of the drop in focus, but the background at f6.3 was way too busy & distracting. This was just a 'quick & dirty' attempt done in about 2 minutes. I had not intended to do this when I took the shots, and so I thought I would disclose what I did as I did not want to mislead anyone.
