First try using combineZP

Last night when I went to bed I kept hearing my pet moth flying around so I kept switching my light on and looking for it. Eventually I did find it, I caught it in a jar. Then I had to go downstairs and get the insect tank, then put the milk bottle lids with honey and sugary water in the tank, then put the jar with the moth in in the tank.

After breakfast I checked my spleenmail, I tried to add a sender to my safe senders list, but hotmail said my safe senders list was full, so I spent a long time editing my safe senders list, removing indivdual email addresses and just adding domains instead. However when I went back to checking my email, it was saying email from sender's wasn't safe, even though their domain was in my safe sender's list. Hopefully Hotmail is just slow to update their lists and it will work tomorrow, otherwise there doesn't seem to be any point to adding a domain to your safe senders list.

This morning I took some macro photos of a blue crystal, I was trying to get it so I could light up the background behind the crystal in a sort of circle shape, kind of like how Jill Greenberg does. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work, I tried using a pen lid on the flash to make the area lit by the flash very small, but it still didn't work.

After that I took some photos of my pet moth. When doing a 5x shot of its face I noticed it had some nice nostrils, but couldn't get them in focus as well as the eyes so I tried shooting a stack. Composition was very difficult and for shooting the stack I just had to adjust the 'zoom' on the lens, which of course moves the whole camera a little bit. Really I could do with a focus rail for shooting static subjects from a tripod.

After that I looked through the dpreview canon lens forum to see if I could find any posts recommending focus stacking software (I knew there was one called CombineZM but I thought there was a newer (and better version) called CombineZ(some other letter). I looked for a bit, then it was lunch time.

After lunch I played on Animal for a bit. Then I carried on reading through the dpreview canon lens forum. After a while I'd read quite a bit but hadn't found the info I was looking for, so I just did a search for CombineZM, then on the CombineZM page it said there was a new version called CombineZP. So I did a google search for 'CombineZP', and that found the thread on dpreview that I had been trying to find. Indeed, CombineZP was the new version that was recommended there.

So I downloaded CombineZP and tried it out. It was very simple to use, and after doing the combine (which takes quite a while when doing all the different combine methods) I saved the combined images and had a look at them. Unfortunately, it looked like the focus was on the moth's nose rather than the eyes, because I hadn't started the stack with the focus far enough back.

So I took the moth out again and took some more photos, starting with the focus further back. Then I copied these to the PC and did a focus stack using CombineZP. I didn't include the first the 2 photos as I thought the focus was too far back, but when I looked at the combined images when CombineZP was finished combining, I realised that actually I did need those images.

So I re-processed again using those images as well. The resulting images (I used all methods again since I don't know what method works best) looked pretty good, especially considering that the moth moved a little bit between shots and the camera/lens must have moved a bit between shots as well. There were a few artefacts though. I put all the combined images CombineZP had just produced into Photoshop and started doing a bit of post procesing, then I put the moth back in the insect tank as I didn't think I would need/want to take any more photos of it at the moment.

I finished processing the image in photoshop. I don't know if CombineZP already does processing on the images, or if it does if you can turn it off. Also the files it produces don't have a color space and are 8bit (I used 16bit TIFFs as the input files for it). I guess if I do any more stacks I will have to try and look and see wheat options are available in CombineZP. Anyway, I was quite impressed with the image it produced considering the images weren't aligned exactly.

I posted a web size version of the final image to deviantart and got like 3 comments on it, which is my most commented deviation ever I think. Normally I get 0 comments. I guess people just saw it on the front page of deviantart, since it shows the last 15 or so submitted deviations on there. I don't expect to get any more comments on it because so many deviations are submitted that it would have got pushed off the front page after a few seconds.

I checked my deviantart messages and new images from people I'm watching as well. After that I think I read something on the internet, can't remember what it was. Maybe it was an article about MySQL and scalability. In a sitepoint email I got the author said they wanted to learn CouchDB and Python in 2009. From the MySQL scalability article I was reading, it sounded like CouchDB might be a good thing to learn (and I'm sure Python would be good to learn as I think Google use it a lot).

Before dinner Clare found my book people delivery by the side gate (wonder why they left it there since I was in all day today and yesterday), the box was rather damp and also torn along one of the bottom sides. Ben opened it up for me (he likes openng parcels) and thankfully both the books were in good condition. They were both hardback books as well, and bigger than I thought they would be. I got 'Birds: The definitive visual guide' and 'Ray Mears and some other bloke: Wild Food' for £9 total.

After dinner I watched s04e01 of Lost, as Maccy got the Blu-ray of season 4 today. Then after that we watched Planet Earth: ice. Then I tidied up my room a bit as it had photo stuff lying around and on my bed. I think I did sumat on my comp (cannae remember what) and then went to bed.

The weather was overcast all day today and most of the snow melted.

Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Frosties; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese sandwich; satsuma; slice of home-made jam victoria sponge cake; caramel Rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Totally delee Asda (I Tom Hink) fajita kit chicken fajitas (although they were slightly too hot); rice. Pudding was Neapolitan ice cream with wafers (nice to cool your mouth off after the hot chili chicken. Coffee; Bailey's chocolate truffle (my last one [:(] ); piece of Sainsbury's caramel chocolate.