I photographed these gliding leaf frogs on my last photo tour to Costa Rica. With macro photography, depth of field becomes more and more shallow as the magnification increases. The challenging issue here was the fact that all four eyes needed to be sharp; unfortunately, they weren't on the same plane -- i.e. they were not all equidistant to the lens. The far right eye was, in fact, out of focus as a result. I used an f/9 aperture, and because I shot this in 2009 when noise was a lot more of an issue than it is now, I kept the ISO down to 640 with a shutter speed of 1/160. Today, I would have raised the ISO until the aperture was f/16 or f/22. To address the problem of the less-than-sharp eye, at first I tried Topaz Sharpen AI on just that small part of the image. It did a good job, but then I tried to copy and paste the sharp eye at the far left onto the soft eye at the far right. Flipping the layer horizontally and then rotating it, I was able to position the new, sharp eye perfectly. Photoshop can be used many ways. One of the most important uses of this program is to overcome the laws of optics and other technical obstacles so we can end up with the perfect pictures we really want.
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