

- HELICON FOCUS METHOD C HALOS MANUAL
- HELICON FOCUS METHOD C HALOS ANDROID
- HELICON FOCUS METHOD C HALOS ISO
Up at "flower-close" range with f/8 or smaller, I find it under-estimates. Helicon Remote does a good job of estimating DOF based on your aperture and distance from subject, then splitting up your A and B stop points to decide how many shots to take. My kit lens makes big focus changes with small movements, while my other lenses make much smaller changes. You may get some totally-unfocussed frames or some unwanted in-focus areas – but you don't have to use them in your processing stack. Pick your ideal farthest point, and then click a few "Medium to Infinity" buttons before "Saving the Farthest Point" when you click "B": Solution: pick the perfect nearest point, and then click a few "Medium to Camera" buttons before "Saving the Nearest Point" when you click "A": When I "exactly" set the A and B bracketing stops, I often miss out on some parts of my subject, towards the camera and towards infinity. Automatic Focus Bracketing TipsĪt least with some of my consumer lenses – particularly the 18-55mm kit lens – on my consumer (camera) body – the repeatability of the focus bracketing is imperfect.

Wait for consistent lighting –the sun should be in the middle of a thick cloud or nowhere near a cloud, or the drapes drawn with a longer shutter speed, or just wipe out the ambient light with shutter and aperture and rely entirely on your flash( es) – then depend on Helicon Remote to snap your stack fast enough to minimize lighting changes.

But fix the shutter speed too – if you let it float, thinking that the camera will accommodate lighting changes when the clouds cover the sun, you will end up with more halos and other odd artefacts. At least fix the aperture – having this vary will wreck your stack immediately.
HELICON FOCUS METHOD C HALOS MANUAL
Helicon recommends fully manual exposure settings. You don't always need all of it – your photograph is seen as through the view-finder, not in a 200% crop. Helicon Focus is faster than most, but two- or three-hundred shots takes time.īecause you know where sharpness falls off, you can stop down and reduce the number of shots while maintaining enough sharpness. This takes time, wears out your shutter, and makes for lengthy post-processing. If you find your lens to be sharpest at, say, f/3.5 and set this up for a landscape shot ranging from ten feet to six hundred feet, you will have hundreds of images. So now, at a given focal length (sharpness will vary throughout a zoom range) you know your sharpest aperture, and have a visual idea of where sharpness starts to fall of unacceptably. The "two-stops-up" method would have said f/11, which would have been only close. Somewhere around f/13, this lens is optimally crisp (at 300mm - it may change at other focal lengths) – it shows up well when zoomed-in on the collage above. Point your lens through an open window toward your neighbour's house instead:

HELICON FOCUS METHOD C HALOS ISO
Yes, you could pull out your ISO 12233 chart and a loupe… but that's a lot of work without matching returns. Run some shots at each stop, then do a vigorous crop – the same on each shot – and eyeball the results. My limited experience says "close enough", but testing your lens will help. The oft-quoted rule of thumb says "two stops up from wide open", whatever that is on your lens. Automation – Helicon Remote – to the rescue.įor reference throughout, I am using a Nikon D5100 – the best of the DX sensors in a modestly-priced body. Manually adjusting the focus for a big stack is tedious and error-prone.
HELICON FOCUS METHOD C HALOS ANDROID
Nor do I want to spend the money on another piece of gear – but I already have a laptop and an Android tablet, making Helicon Remote the greatest thing since sliced bread. My interests lie more with "flower macros" and landscape focus stacking and less with antennae – a focus rail doesn't help at all for landscapes. Some thoughts on macro, but not ultra-macro, use of Helicon Remote Getting StartedĪuto-focus stacking is a revelation.
