Originally posted by John Hill I have a K-5 and a variety of mostly manual lenses and I am interested in focus stacking for outdoor scenes.
I have read about changing focus points between shots and about manually turning the focus but I expect there would be movement issues with both.
So I am considering making a motor mechanism to manually turn the focus ring between shots. Any comments please?
john
Buy a solid tripod instead. I routinely do focus stacks of 15 it more images and have never had an issue with camera movement.
It is impossible to get away from minor magnification differences caused by refocusing, and it is preferable to use a focus rail rather than the focus ring if your work turns towards macro, but in general landscape photography, any decent stacking software will take minute alignment and magnification issues into account.
You don't have a bad idea, merely a useless one. You are looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
---------- Post added 02-13-19 at 08:41 AM ----------
Originally posted by victormeldrew With a sturdy tripod and some care, there is no reason why manual focusing would cause significant movement. Anyway, aligning the images is a standard part of the focus stacking process.
What I'm not clear on is why would need focus stacking on landscapes?
Unless one is using a view camera which allows altering the camera geometry to control depth of field, it can be very very impossible to get some sufficient depth of field even from an aps-c camera on a single exposure.
I can get more depth of field from my 4x5 than from my k3.