Focus versus Rail stacking Poll

deanimator wrote:

DavidWright2010 wrote:

Bill Janes wrote:

Rik Littlefield, author of Zerene Stacker and one of the moderators of the above forum, has a good post on this subject. Which method to use depends mainly on the magnification.

I read this Rik Littlefield post, and he mentions all the problems I imagined that the rail method introduces. (More than I imagined, actually.) And he claims that the rail method is 'mediocre' for a flower bouquet. Given the problems he discusses, that seemed a fair assessment.

But my experience does not bear that out. The rail method is at least 10x easier than the focus method for me - in this recent post, I presented a stacked flower bouquet where I accepted the stacker output without any changes. My bouquet required about 10 cm of camera movement (1 meter camera-subject distance) - maybe that was sufficiently small that perspective changes weren't noticeable? (Or the stacker compensated by locating control points?)

And of course, this is using a Sigma DP3M camera - there's no software control of focus like is offered with a Nikon, and it is very difficult to get regular focus steps by manually adjusting focus.

David

Using something like DSLR Controller is trivially easy, since the change of focus process is EXACTLY the same as the change of position control in the Wemacro app.

• DSLR Controller - Set focus start point and focus end point.
• Wemacro App - Set rail travel start point and rail travel end point.

If I had any idea what "DSLR Controller" or "Wemacro App" were, I might find them "trivially easy", but somehow I doubt it at my age.

Meanwhile, David's Sigma DP3M is nota DSLR and could turn out to be quite uncontrollable ...