{"id":31271,"date":"2024-11-18T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2024-11-18T14:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=31271"},"modified":"2024-11-18T14:59:33","modified_gmt":"2024-11-18T19:59:33","slug":"calibrating-a-focus-bracket-with-the-sony-90mm-macro-lens-on-the-a7-iv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/18\/calibrating-a-focus-bracket-with-the-sony-90mm-macro-lens-on-the-a7-iv\/","title":{"rendered":"Calibrating a Focus Bracket with the Sony 90mm Macro Lens on the A7 IV"},"content":{"rendered":"

TomD brought up a lot of good points about the limitations and vagaries of focus stacking so I tried to get a better handle on the mechanics of the settings used.<\/p>\n

And when in need of a handy dandy close up subject I hauled out my extremely dead tarantula spider.\u00a0 He has the benefit of being a rather large macro subject.\u00a0 So I arranged the camera on a tripod at the minimum focal distance and set the bracket spacing to 4 out of 10 and selected 125 frames.\u00a0 After the end I measured the length of the spider that was in focus in the bracket.\u00a0 It came to about 2.5 inches.\u00a0 Now this is a ballpark because there was an angle to the camera.\u00a0 but this gives a decent idea of how many shots are needed to cover a depth of field.<\/p>\n

Here is the first bracket frame<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s the last (125th) frame<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is the stacked composite<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And finally here is a photo taken from the same distance at a very small aperture (f\\18) as a comparison.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now this stack took 50 minutes to crank out on my laptop.\u00a0 Is it worth the time and effort?\u00a0 I guess that’s a personal choice.\u00a0 But I’m kind of enjoying playing around with a new technique.\u00a0 And that’s probably the nerd in me showing through.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong><\/p>\n

TomD commented:<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a lifelong certified arachnophobe, 2.5\u201d inches is entirely too big (by at least an order of magnitude) for a live spider to be.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks for the experiment! Enlightening!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even with 4 steps\/per frame x 125 frames, or 500 steps, it still didn\u2019t get the abdomen. So 500 steps only covered around 1.75\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s extremely unintuitive and approaching unusable.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I said in an earlier post, the software that I played with at the camera club would have the entire object with 8-10 exposures.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe that\u2019s more a function of the lens than the software. I\u2019ve done a lot of macro work using several lenses and noticed that macro lenses with a very close focus all have a razor thin usable depth of field. I wonder what would happen if you took a good prime lens in the 85+mm range, moved it back and tried the same experiment at something like f8?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You would have to crop in to get the same image size but I\u2019ve noticed that ou A7IV\u2019s can be cropped quite a ways and still have great IQ\u2019s (image quality).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Using the setup specs of your experiment, I\u2019d say that the upper dof limit is in the inch range.<\/strong><\/p>\n

photog replied:<\/em><\/p>\n

Tom, I’m going to play around with this function.\u00a0 I want to see what I can do with it.\u00a0 It seems like an interesting tool that I might find some good applications for.\u00a0 But I can see that it might not have any compelling uses for most people.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TomD brought up a lot of good points about the limitations and vagaries of focus stacking so I tried to get a better handle on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[660,4418,3,659],"tags":[4702,2266,2265,461,2414],"class_list":["post-31271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-camera-reviews","category-photo-study","category-photography","category-photography-reviews","tag-focus-bracketing","tag-focus-stacking","tag-macrophotography","tag-photography","tag-tarantula"],"yoast_head":"\nCalibrating a Focus Bracket with the Sony 90mm Macro Lens on the A7 IV - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/18\/calibrating-a-focus-bracket-with-the-sony-90mm-macro-lens-on-the-a7-iv\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Calibrating a Focus Bracket with the Sony 90mm Macro Lens on the A7 IV - 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