Cross Stitch Floss (click to enlarge)

We have a cross-stitcher in the house.  While stitching, they put their floss scraps in a Mountain Dew bottle.  At the end of their current project, I cut open the bottle and used the floss for a stacked-focus macro project.  The pile of floss turned out to be a cylinder about 4 inches tall by 2.5 inches across.

I put the stack of floss inside my Fotodiox studio in a box to get even light around the entirety of the floss cylinder.  I then mounted my camera on my tripod with a Really Right Stuff B-150 Macro Focusing Rail.  Given the depth of the stack of floss, the use of a macro lens, and the close lens to floss distance, there was no f-stop that could achieve the depth of field needed to get the entire stack of floss in sharp focus.  Even using f/40 on my Tamron 90mm macro lens, only a limited depth of field was in sharp focus.

Really Right Stuff has a good macro article on their blog here.  In that blog they mention stacking 10, 50, and even 70 images depending on the depth of the subject.  The image above is a stack of 97 images.  Had I realized it was 97, I would have taken three more to make it an even 100!  With my Nikon D-810, each RAW image ended up being 77mb.

Not surprisingly, during post processing my iMac (with 32gb of RAM) choked when trying to stack the 97 images.  To get around this, I stacked 25 images, flattened the file, and repeated this four times.  I then took those four files and stacked them.  The result is the image above.

Click on the image, to open it in another window, then click on it again to zoom in.  You can see individual threads coming off the floss strands.  I am pretty happy with the macro rail and the Fotodiox studio in a box.