Z8 - any way to trigger focus shift without the menu?

[Crispy_Bee]

Here's the situation:

At work I'm often tasked with creating 3d models using photogrammetry.

I've recently acquired an automatic turntable which I managed to connect to the Z8 so now I can let it do the most tedious job for me (at least for one full rotation, then I need to move the camera manually but that's fine). And that works great for stuff I can get into focus at f20-f22.

But for small objects I have to use focus bracketing/focus shift in order to get a useful resolution with a useful DOF and a good amount of details on the model - and that doesn't work with a trigger. For that I have to get into the menu to use focus shift for every photo for every position. So that's a couple of hundred of times for every subject.

With Sony I can set the shooting mode to focus bracketing, which is great but I have to reset the focus point after every shot. Tedious but not quite 'as' tedious as working on Nikon.

Is there any way around that? Something I'm missing? I've set up focus shift as a quick menu option so that saves me an additional button press.. but... yeah... I wish I had the convenience of the Sony shooting mode with the focus point reset of the Nikon Z system.

 

[PLShutterbug]

No, unfortunately not. You have discovered the closest you can get. I really wish Nikon would implement Focus Shift as a new shutter mode. Then we could set things up in the menu, switch the shutter mode, and then just shoot.

One of the challenges you get into is setting the right step interval and number of shots for a given subject. However, for your needs where you have a predictable near/far range and need to do many shots on your turntable, a shutter mode would be really nice. I imagine there are many others who could benefit from this, too.

 

[Crispy_Bee]

Thank you, at least my suspicions are confirmed.

It's really too bad, honestly streamlining the focusshift mode like that would've made more sense than combining pixelshift and focusshift in the last firmware update.

So right now it's actually faster to use the Sony for macro photogrammetry because it's faster to manually set the focus back to the starting point (if it's the MFD) than opening the focusshift menu item after every single shot... and the turntable can't be used in auto-mode anyway. *sigh*

 

[Oceanmonkey123]

With all the technology that is being put into cameras now I find it difficult to understand why Nikon can’t implement a better system. I use a Z8 along with the Z105MC lens for close up/macro and struggle not being able to handhold to shoot a series of images with a shift in focus. Use the OM series which offers this and you soon see how frustrating it becomes that Nikon don’t/wont put this in their cameras. To me that would make the Z8 or indeed many of their other cameras perfect. Come on Nikon, it’s software not hardware to achieve this.

 

[Bernard Delley]

For my AF testing , I need to set to defocus and then refocus again. I still do that manually now. But Horshack's answer to the question could I automate it was as below. Its approach might be applied to your problem.

Horsehacks script: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/61907096
#!/bin/sh

for i in $(seq 1 5)
do
echo "At iteration $i"

# rack focus to infinity
echo "Racking focus to infinity..."
gphoto2 --quiet --set-config manualfocusdrive=30000
sleep 1

# autofocus
echo "Engaging autofocus"
gphoto2 --quiet --set-config autofocusdrive=1
sleep 2

# take a photo and download it to the computer
gphoto2 --set-config capturetarget=1 --capture-image-and-download
sleep 1
done