#ZERENE STACKER VS. HELICON FOCUS HOW TO#
The written instructions that come with them are difficult to comprehend, though I find it is easy to show workshop clients how to use these lenses. They are expensive and there is a learning curve to successfully using them.
However, tilt and shift lenses aren’t for everyone. Tilt lenses work well and I have used them for decades with wonderful results. For example, it is easy to make a tilt lens sharply focus a field of tulips or wildflowers. When the lens is tilted exactly the right amount, and in the proper direction, it is possible if the angle isn’t too extreme to make the plane of focus align perfectly with the plane of the subject without having both of them parallel to each other. Lenses that bend are called tilt lenses and they do amazing things. Canon and Nikon offer several lenses that bend or shift.
Normally, you must use superb technique and align the most important plane of the subject with the plane of the camera’s sensor to achieve the greatest overall sharpness. Of course, make sure the flashes have time to fully replenish their energy before shooting each successive image to obtain even lighting between images in the stack. I commonly use flash for landscapes, shoot at f/5.6 to allow my flash or flashes to light the foreground, and then stack my way through the scene. This probably isn’t a problem in close-up photography, but it is a frequent problem in landscape photography. Stopping the lens down makes it difficult for the flash to light distant or large objects. The flower will be perfectly sharp and the background and foreground will look like it would at the chosen aperture.ĭon’t forget about flash. Shoot the lens wide open, perhaps f/4, and stack you way through the blossom. If you want a single flower blossom perfectly sharp, and everything else nicely out of focus, focus stacking is the best way to do it. Focus stacking is not just about getting the most overall sharpness, it also is incredibly helpful for selective focus. This often causes unsightly background distractions. Smaller apertures not only increase the depth of field covering the subject, but they bring details in the background more in focus. Often using a faster shutter speed produces sharper images. This slower shutter speed becomes a problem when photographing handheld or fighting a persistent breeze blowing the subject. Shooting with f/32 requires a shutter speed three stops slower than f/11. Here’s a list:Īs already explained, stopping down the lens causes a loss of sharpness everywhere in the image due to diffraction. Stopping the lens down to the smaller apertures – f/16 to f/32 - creates many problems that are easily avoided by using more intermediate apertures such as f/8 or f/11. Although photographer opinions vary, I feel that f/32 and even f/22 is worthless on this lens and probably most other lenses as well. Although, in theory, the depth of field is greater at f/32, the overall image sharpness is far less than f/11 due to diffraction.
I was horrified by how bad it is at f/32-even f/22 produced underwhelming results. When I tested the diffraction on my Canon 180mm macro lens for a new book-Close Up Photography in Nature. This bending is known as diffraction and causes a loss of sharpness everywhere in the image. Due to the wave nature of light, as the hole it passes through decreases in diameter, a larger percentage of the light touches the edge of the hole and bends. In simple terms, these f/stops refer to the tiny hole in the lens that is called the aperture. Due to the laws of physics, though, the greatest depth of field is always at the smallest aperture (largest f/stop number) which is usually f/22 or f/32. With a 200mm f/4 lens, for example, the sharpest apertures are around f/8 to f/11. The sharpest aperture on the lens is typically two to three stops down from the maximum aperture on the lens. All photographers have problems achieving sufficient depth of field and superb image sharpness imultaneously because it is a trade-off.
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