Wednesday my car wouldn't start after dropping of a days production of camera straps at the Post Office. I ended up walking home (4 miles). I've been wanting to start walking again but that was a bit more than my body was ready for. I can still move, though. Thursday morning I took a couple of suspect fuses off the car and into the local NAPA auto parts store. There was nothing wrong with them. I put them back on the car and it started up. I was about a mile from home when the engine stopped running. This time I knocked on a nearby door and Zoe picked me up. Friday morning it started right up and I drove it to my mechanic. No word on it yet. My friend Blaine refers to this as car wars.

The big thing this week was discovering focus stacking.

This is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Macro photography usually means very narrow depth of field. You can stop the lens down to increase the depth of field somewhat, and get more of the subject into focus, but then you get into diffraction degredation of the image, which makes the image less sharp. This picture is the result of combining 5 images, each image focused a little bit further down the top of the camera. It's called focus stacking and the software I used is Helicon Focus. This was a quick and dirty test. On close examination I should have used 10 images and focused a little further out. I just used the default settings on Helicon Focus. What an amazing tool! I found out about it from a post at Luminous Landscape: The Joys of Extended Depth of Field or Goodnight Dr. Scheimflug, wherever you are. I shot this with my Panasonic G1 with an M42 adapter and a 35 year-old Pentax Super-Multi-Coated Macro-Takumar 50/4 at f11. Did I say this was totally amazing!

I have a Flickr stream with more and larger images: focus stacking. I also made a 10x13 inch print of this image. Wow! Finding Helicon Focus as I was starting to play with macro-photography was my good luck. Images are floating through my head.

A word on reading e-books on a computer. It's hard to tell how long the book is. I thought that the Count of Monte Cristo was taking a long time until I looked it up on Amazon and found the unabridged edition has over 1,400 pages. It was a great read. I've started Sir Richard Francis Burton's "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night", free on Project Gutenberg. It has 16 volumes.

As if starting a 16 volume book wasn't enough of a time sucker, I have a new turntable on the way.

It's an Audio-Technica PL120 Turntable. I have boxes of LPs that are crying out to be ripped.