Photographing Old Fishing Lures

We recently had a macro photography assignment at my photo club and I decided to take some very detailed photos of some old fishing lures. I took my inspiration from Peter Andrew Lusztyk, a Canadian photographer that creates very large prints for macro subjects.

With macro photography you typically have very thin slivers of the subject in sharp focus (a couple of millimeters) and everything else is blurred. To get around this problem you need to take a series of photos of the same subject at different focus points. You then combine all of the images using specialized software to merge the different images into a single image with everything in focus. This is called “Focus Stacking”. You can do focus stacking in Photoshop, but I decided to use Helicon Focus since it provides more advanced masking and editing tools.

For this specific lure I took 52 different photos at different focus points to get everything in focus. I recently printed and framed this photo as 9x18 and I love all of the crusty details you can view in the actual print.

Here are some additional lure photos I captured. I may create a new series of photos with a potential title of “Old but can still catch fish”. This is a play on the age of the lures (and also the fisherman). I will take these old lures fishing and see if they still can catch some fish and include a photo with the fish it caught.