Photos from the Pine Creek Loop Trail

I took these photos on Sunday, Sept 1 from the Pine Creek Loop Trail.  I went out late in the afternoon and stayed out until well after sunset when I took the photo of the Beeline Highway Traffic.  All photos were taken using a tripod and, in some instances, I used focus stacking to try to get both near and far subjects all in focus.

This photo was taken from the parking area for the Ballantine Trailhead.  (The Pine Creek Loop starts from the Ballantine Trailhead.  The Ballantine Trail doesn’t actually start until you’re about 1.5 miles in on the Pine Creek Loop.

This photo, below, was taken from a short way up the trail.

The photo below is the only one in this group where focus stacking really paid off.  I used the technique on several others too, but did not see as much of a benefit with those photos. Note that both the saguaros and the cacti and rocks in the foreground are all sharp.  I composed this photo from three different shots where different elements were in focus.

One of the issues with employing this technique is that the magnification changes slightly as the focal point changes, causing the various exposures to be slightly misaligned.  There is a technique called image registration which can be used to align several similar images. It turns out that there’s a GIMP Image Registration Plug-in that works very well.  When I first tried it though, it didn’t appear to give good results at all.  The trick to making it work for my photos were to change the Transformation Model from Shift and Rotate to Affine Transformation.

Once I had the three layers aligned, I then masked two of the layers to show only the in-focus elements from that layer.

Sunset:

These last three were all taken after sunset.