Ideally to achieve this level of focus across the entire bowl of flowers you need editing software (I used Lightroom and Photoshop), a tripod to keep the camera still, a light source (I used the overhead lights in our kitchen) and patience.

I put the camera on the tripod, set the lens to manual focus and the camera to Aperture priority with F6.3 as the aperture but anything from f4 to f8 will do.

I manually focused on the flower at the front of the bowl and took a shot, then bit by bit I started to rotate the focus ring on the lens so that the focus moved progressively towards the back of the group, taking a shot each time.

I took 51 photos (it could be more or less, 51 was just how many it took for this project) and then imported them all into Lightroom.

To speed the process up a bit and to stop the computer working its buns off with raw files in Photoshop I converted all images to hi-res jpegs and then uploaded them as layers in Photoshop.

In Photoshop I clicked on Edit and Autoblend layers. What Photoshop did then was to identify the bits of each photo where the focus was sharpest and use that to make the end result you see here.

Once Photoshop had worked its magic I collapsed the group of layers into one and then did the final crop and tidying up of the image and then saved the final image as another Jpeg.

The droplets were added with a water sprayer for a better effect – Voila!

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