How Was This Picture Made #10: The Answer

We had a lot of good guesses on our tenth “How Was This Picture Made” article, including a couple that were almost entirely spot-on. Congratulations to Photography Life reader Goh Wei Jun for his guess — he will receive a copy of our upcoming eBook, Creative Landscape Photography, as a prize. So, how was this photograph made? This article dives into the entire process.

NIKON D800E + 70-200mm f/4 @ 86mm, ISO 100, 1/10, f/16.0

First, the photograph was a focus stack of six images. I combined them all in Photoshop, then did a few manual corrections when the stacking process failed. Because the sand in the foreground is relatively undefined, it was a bit of a tricky photograph to stack, but Photoshop did a pretty good job.

The focal length of the lens was the toughest part to guess. Ultimately, I shot this photo at 86mm simply because it provided the best composition. There was no way to tell the scale