Gears

A month ago, I purchased off Amazon a package of small gears used for jewelry. I piled the gears on a black table during the last couple of weeks and started shooting using a manual focus stack technique.

First, using a 50mm lens and an extension tube, I focused on the closest spot. Then moving the camera slowly forward, I would shoot about ten frames. Next, in Photoshop, I used the auto-align layers and auto blend layers features. The manual - no tripod - manual focus stacked created blank white edges that I filled with Photoshop's content-aware feature. Between the uneven focus stack and content-aware areas, these images ended up with interesting blurred regions.