Chocolate-Covered Pretzels

By Laurie

In the days before the 2022 New Year holiday, both Beverly and I had family members visit us, and everyone brought food. One of the food items was a package containing a variety of chocolate-covered pretzels. There were several varieties including a dark chocolate pretzel covered with little brown, yellow, and orange-coated candies like small M&Ms, and one covered with what appeared to be chocolate chips coated with small sprinkles. Several of the sprinkle coated chocolate chips were just loose in the package and I thought these would make a great macro photography subject. What was most interesting to me was the detail of the sprinkles and the little depressions where there had been sprinkles in the chocolate chip. The chocolate chip was about ⅜” across and the small sprinkles were about 1/32″ across.

One of my visiting grandsons had expressed an interest in photography so when I was photographing the chocolate chip with sprinkles, he participated and asked questions. Later, when I was developing the images he helped me by doing some editing in Photoshop that I was unable to do.

One of the limitations of Macro (closeup) photography is that there is a very shallow depth of field for typical setups. This shallow depth of field is related to the relationship between the focal length of the lens, the distance between the camera and the subject, and the lens aperture.

The depth of field of the featured image setup was about 1/16″, which means the subject can not be all in focus in a single photograph. Therefore, this image consists of five photographs, each focused on a different part of the subject and combined using a technique called focus stacking (for more information about macro photography, depth-of-field, and focus stacking, please see the Definitions & Apps page.)