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Advice on Focus Bracket Settings

Started Nov 23, 2020 | Questions thread
gardenersassistant Veteran Member • Posts: 9,656
Re: Advice on Focus Bracket Settings

carltj wrote:

So, I have an R5 with a 2.8 100mm macro and shoot mosses, liverworts, lichen, when in macro mode.

As a rule, I'm looking for an in-focus depth of 1-3 cm. Beyond three cm, I'm happy to surrender to OoF background, blending to brokeh.

blending to out of focus may be problematic. If you use an aperture which is optimal for sharpness (i.e. fairly close to wide open) you are likely to get a rapid/sudden transition between in-focus and out-of-focus areas. With some scenes you can find a distance at which to end the stacking where there is a "gap" across which none of the elements of the scene cross. This can give a more or less natural looking transition. If not though, which I think is likely to be the case with moss for example, you may want to use an aperture sufficiently smaller than the optical optimum so as to give a smoother transition in the final shot in the stack.

How would you set aperture, number of shots, and focus increment to have highest probability of achieving this?

With greater depth of field for each individual shot in the stack you would be able to reduce the number of shots and increase the focus increment, although in my experience with botanical subjects I haven't noticed any disadvantage with having "too many" shots in the stack. The technique I use (employing video) gives a "dense" set of images which can be thinned out to use only every third or fourth shot with no difference in the stack that I saw when experimenting with this. But I don't bother thinning out the stack because I don't see any adverse effects of using a dense stack.

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