A focus stack effort...

[Yannis1976]

I have been playing with the idea of focus stacking between the XT5 and A7C2 and so far I give the edge to Fuji although it is still far from perfect...







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Yannis

Yannis Tzevelekos

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[Ridiculous Display Name]

Very pretty. I would suggest though expanding the effort to include the whole flower.

just today i started doing some focus stacking with the 80mm macro i just bought (a very nice lens!).

today i just worked with it on auto, figuring the camera was smarter than me at this point. i have learned that unless you have a need for spacing out the time between each shot, you just put the steps on "0". and then choose point A for the closest you want to go (click "OK" button) and point B for the furthest (and oddly, click the "BACK" button) and of course don't forget to switch the mode to Burst, like i kept doing! )

you will get a wide range of the number of shots it decides to take, but it will be a lot. the 'fewest' i had today was around 200 and the most was around 450.

 

[machoman]

I have been playing with the idea of focus stacking between the XT5 and A7C2 and so far I give the edge to Fuji although it is still far from perfect...

10/10 !



Beautifully done. Perfecto.

Very creative with the blurred line also.

 

[Yannis1976]

I have been playing with the idea of focus stacking between the XT5 and A7C2 and so far I give the edge to Fuji although it is still far from perfect...

10/10 !

Beautifully done. Perfecto.

Very creative with the blurred line also.

Thank you both! I thought nobody liked this photo

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Yannis Tzevelekos

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[Ridiculous Display Name]

No, it's fine. I simply didn't quite understand the need for making a focus stack for that particular image. That looks like an image with a usual depth of field.

 

[Yannis1976]

No, it's fine. I simply didn't quite understand the need for making a focus stack for that particular image. That looks like an image with a usual depth of field.

Fair question, but believe it or not, my 16-80 at f5.6 couldn't have all the flower in focus. So I said why not play with focus stack... Although I tried to put point A in the beginning and point B on the back, I ended up with about 50 images that produced that result... It seems the auto focus stacking algorithm needs a lot to be improved...

 

[Ridiculous Display Name]

Then you might try it manually, but I can't offer any pointers for that. That one takes a fair amount of trial and error.

Or perhaps you fooled yourself that the B point was enough....?

 

[William the X-T5 guy]

Very pretty. I would suggest though expanding the effort to include the whole flower.

just today i started doing some focus stacking with the 80mm macro i just bought (a very nice lens!).

today i just worked with it on auto, figuring the camera was smarter than me at this point. i have learned that unless you have a need for spacing out the time between each shot, you just put the steps on "0". and then choose point A for the closest you want to go (click "OK" button) and point B for the furthest (and oddly, click the "BACK" button) and of course don't forget to switch the mode to Burst, like i kept doing! )

you will get a wide range of the number of shots it decides to take, but it will be a lot. the 'fewest' i had today was around 200 and the most was around 450.

I find the same with the camera left to do it on it's own. Below is a focus stack I did with the X-T5 and 80/2.8 macro.

To be fair to the camera, I had the aperture set to F4, so I could have closed down a couple of stops. The camera did ~200 exposures, enough that I had to split the stack into two 4 separate batches and then combine them into a stack. My computer choked on it if I tried to do the whole thing as one stack.

I haven't played with limiting the number of exposures in the set-up on the theory that the camera probably knows best.

--
Bill.
Proud user of Pentax and Fuji camera gear.

 

[Ridiculous Display Name]

Nice image. That's the lens I'm using too. I had first gone cheap, and bought a Samyang 100mm macro, but realized how difficult it would be without it fully connecting with the camera. So I turned it in and got the Fuji. Both used from MPB.

I am not clear yet that the camera knows best. I just figured for a novice it knows better. )

I'm such a nervous creature. After I clicked the shutter, and saw the count was going to be 450, all I could imagine my camera wearing out at an early age! And after all that, I didn't like the result very much.

 

[William the X-T5 guy]

Nice image. That's the lens I'm using too. I had first gone cheap, and bought a Samyang 100mm macro, but realized how difficult it would be without it fully connecting with the camera. So I turned it in and got the Fuji. Both used from MPB.

I am not clear yet that the camera knows best. I just figured for a novice it knows better. )

I've done a lot of focus stacks. Until I got the X-T5 I used a Pentax K1 for this stuff. I did focus stacks by turning the focus ring a little bit at a time, using a focusing rail, and also a bellows. I've used a 100mm macro, 200mm macro and the bellows 100 lens on the K1 and often manage to get soft spots.

I'm willing to defer to the camera as it seems to eliminate the issue.

This was shot on the K1 and the legendary FA*200/4 macro. It's 19 exposures deep.

I'm such a nervous creature. After I clicked the shutter, and saw the count was going to be 450, all I could imagine my camera wearing out at an early age! And after all that, I didn't like the result very much.

These cameras should go a couple hundred thousand shutter cycles or more, and if you use electronic shutter only, you aren't wearing the mechanical bits. I like to use the lens at it's best aperture, which on the 80mm macro seems to be f8, though f11 is still very acceptable. Smaller than that and things seem to soften up.

Looking at the operators manual, it looks like manual focus stacking doesn't come with a really predictable end point. My reading is that you set the number of exposures and a rather undefined focus movement increment and let the camera have at it for as far as it will move in that number of exposures, stopping at infinity if it gets that far.

I could see that being useful for deep landscapes

--
Bill.
Proud user of Pentax and Fuji camera gear.

 

[Ridiculous Display Name]

Yeah that was my reading of the manual too. It seemed too ambiguous. But I still want to try working that way because the opposite side of the coin is with the Auto setting, you can really end up with way too many images than is probably needed. I think with experience (that I don't yet have) one can learn what the happy medium is and figure that out manually. Yes?

I did actually have it on mechanical shutter for that 450 shot stack. Oops. No more of that! 200,000 cycles divided by 450 shots per stack, I would only get 444 stacks before I wear out the camera. )

 

[baobob]

You might look at

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/68279346

Bob

 

[Yannis1976]

You might look at

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/68279346

Bob

Thanks Bob! What was the lens aperture?

 

[baobob]

F 5.6

These were my very first trials. I kept the Tamron 18-300mm fittes on the XH2s since I did not know which FL I'll be using. 1/850 sec or faster at 3200 ISO. I was operating handheld the XH2s being able on the CF card and with the stacked sensor to record 10 shots in a sec.

I stacked the shots in PS (LR does the same) and if you move just a little bit usually PS can assemble the shots without error.

The enemy is the wind since it creates different views while recording the bracketed files ! Then assembling is always very bad...

With the XT5 try the bracketing parameters as 10/5/0 to start with then increase the second one. With a tripod 30+ is possible. Only JPEGs if using LR/PS for stacking due to limits of the program. As usual a powerful computer is needed (I'm sure you have one !!) if you do not want to wait and wait and wait.

With my settings assembling 10/30/0 took around 3 to 5 min if I remember correctly. (Ryzen 7, Geforce 3060, 32 Gb)

Waiting for more samples!

Bob

 

[baobob]

Xh2s handheld Tamron 18-300mm 3200 ISO settings for focus bracketing 10/30/0

(Stains due to some anti moss spray on the roof, :-( )

--
Good judgment comes from experience
Experience comes from bad judgment

Bob RJF

www.flickr.com

 

[Ridiculous Display Name]

thanks for the tips. will try.

 

[baobob]

See the last one passion flower

 

[baobob]

--
Good judgment comes from experience
Experience comes from bad judgment
https://www.flickr.com/people/robertjf/

 

[William the X-T5 guy]

Yeah that was my reading of the manual too. It seemed too ambiguous. But I still want to try working that way because the opposite side of the coin is with the Auto setting, you can really end up with way too many images than is probably needed. I think with experience (that I don't yet have) one can learn what the happy medium is and figure that out manually. Yes?

I did actually have it on mechanical shutter for that 450 shot stack. Oops. No more of that! 200,000 cycles divided by 450 shots per stack, I would only get 444 stacks before I wear out the camera. )

It's going to be one of those learn by experimentation things and take lots of notes. Manual focus bracketing always moves from close focus towards infinity.

The number of images you want is going to depend on initial focus distance, focal length and aperture. Change one and everything else needs to be recalculated.

Google AI (which I will give some faith for getting it right for this sort of stuff) says the X-T5 is rated to 300k exposure cycles. This is mean time before failure, which means that the shutter that breaks the first time it is cycled is averaged out by the one that lasts 600k cycles.

If it's a concern, do what I did and set up a user mode specifically for focus bracketing and lock in the electronic shutter. The nice thing about using the electronic shutter is removing shutter induced camera movement which makes it easier for the stacking software.

As an aside, if you use the pixel shift mode, it only works well with the electronic shutter only. If the mechanical shutter is used the post processing will fail every time due to camera shake.

And stop the lens down. Going from f4 to f8 cuts the number of exposures in half, thereabouts.

 

[Ridiculous Display Name]

Me? Take notes? Surely you're joking.

But this is all very useful information. As for the MTBF, I'm just chronic worry wart. I was trying to find the shutter count of my camera and couldn't find it. I swear I thought that was in the menu somewhere, but I can't even find it in the manual now.

As for Pixel Shift, I have only just tried it a quick few times in my studio, and each failed. I can't remember whether I had it on manual shutter or not, but what you say certainly stands to reason. I need to keep trying with that too. Both the macro/focus stack and Pixel Shift are playing parts in a project I have in mind, and that I'm hardly near to accomplishing. But in short, it involves printing out as large as 3ft by 4 ft. I'm not sure, though, whether the Pixel Shift thing is really something I need to beat my head against the wall for. Technically what the XT5 can shoot "normally" should be more than enough detail/resolution to print that large.

And of course, I could always require the viewer not to stand anywhere less than 10 feet from the photo. )