Welcome to the further adventures of me playing around with the newly added focus bracketing function on my Sony A7IV camera. Although I was using the Sony 90mm macro lens this isn’t a macro bracket. I set up a few small statues in a location that caught the late afternoon light and ran a hundred shots with a medium setting on the focus change. I’ve attached the first file (1) and the last file (100) followed by the merged product.
(1)
(100)
merged product
Now this isn’t all that an exciting test. Afterwards I though I probably should have included a shot at a very small aperture like F8 or F16 as a comparison of what can be done the old fashioned way without the software magic. But I didn’t think of that before.
Anyway, just another test as I play around with my fun new toy.
Maltese Falcon?
Yes! I’m a big fan of the book and movie.
100!!?? Did you shoot raw or jpeg? If you shot those raw, the file size would have been in the multi-gig range. That merge would have choked my relatively fast desktop.
As a proof of concept, that flat worked.
Did you shoot that at 2.8? What distance?
Tom, I didn’t do this too scientifically. The aperture was f\4. The camera was on a tripod about 5 feet from the front of the group. Front to back on the group of statues was about three feet. You know how big the raw files are on the A7IV. I used the highest quality so they were like 60 meg. The stacking software (Affinity Photo) was grinding away for a half hour at least, using up 100% of my laptop’s processor. The processor is an AMD Athlon Silver 3050U with Radeon Graphics, 2.30 GHz. It was using about 6 gig… Read more »
Affinity, huh? The few test shots I’ve done so far I used Photoshop but it was a multi-step and fairly complex sequence. More akin to a workaround as opposed to a top level function. The net shows Zircon is the best but when I looked, that is subscription software only and I don’t want more of that. I’m still pissed from when PS went subscription rather that owning it permanently. And then forced me to abandon my owned versions by not giving updates so that you could open RAW files from new cameras. Which affinity version did you get? Is… Read more »
I’ll provide the disclaimer that I haven’t researched focus stacking programs at all. I used Affinity because I wouldn’t pay for a license for photoshop and Affinity at the time was cheap. For all I know it’s worst stacking program around but it seems to work.
Yesterday, I experimented some and found what I consider the Achilles heel of the method. This isn’t a factor for inanimate objects but outdoor nature photography becomes difficult to say the least. I was trying to shoot a clump of red berries in a bush and then a flower (this is Florida)> There was no detectable wind the the 1/4 mph (or whatever) was just enough to move the subject 1/8” to 1/16”, just barely. That would have had little to no effect in regular photography but it totally ruled out stacked images for any purpose. That + the sheer… Read more »
Definitely a limitation on the use of the technique. I’m excited about trying it out on resting dragonflies next summer. Here’s where the ingenuity of the photographer has to step in. So, a dragonfly on a thin plant stalk will be unmanageable. But on a sturdy plant like a rose bush stem or on a fence will be doable. And the possibilities for a foreground/landscape shot is definitely practicable.