The "Through The Viewfinder" With Suzette" Story

 It was an ordinary day.  Just finished reading a "Through The Viewfinder" article that was in my October 15, 2023 Sunday newspaper.  The half-page article features a photograph as well as a story about the photograph that was written by one of Lancaster Newspaper's professional photographers.  The story today was written by Suzette Wenger.  Suzette has been a photographer for many years at the Lancaster Newspaper office and always comes up with fantastic articles as well as photographs to illustrate the article.  Today's story featured a photograph of a black swallowtail caterpillar having a feast on her backyard parsley in late August.  She quickly ran for her camera.  In her story she tells that to process this photograph, nine images were used, and all were focused manually at different positions on the caterpillar and stacked together in Photoshop.  The goal was to gain better depth of field even though the f-stop was set at f-25.  When you shoot so close to a small subject such as the caterpillar, the depth of field is a very minimal distance.  Suzette listed the many, many steps she followed while taking the photograph in the story that appeared in the newspaper.  If you are not a professional photographer, you might have had trouble understanding all the procedures needed to accomplish her goal.  Well, she finally opened the image in Luminar to tone Mrs. Cate R. Pillar to her liking after completing the necessary steps that were involved.  Eventually, the image was transferred back to Photoshop for minor adjustments and than cropped with some minor dodging and burning.  Alas!  The result was complete.  Suzette has been a staff photographer at Lancaster Newspapers for many years and her work is always unbelievable!  The "Through The Viewfinder" story appears in the Sunday edition every week.  I must apologize if the photograph that accompanies this story isn't as good as the copy that appears in the Sunday newspaper.  I had to make my copy from my Sunday Newspaper and the quality I ended up with wasn't as clear as what appeared in the newspaper.  But, I think you can get an idea as to what Suzette had to go through in order to create her beautiful black swallowtail butterfly photograph.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.