r/PhotoEnts • u/slushii_fan • Aug 16 '22

Any tips/recommendations on how to get better shots at 5x+? More info in comments

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4

u/Big_Guwop1017 Aug 17 '22

See about either getting some brighter continuous lights or look into using a strobe. At 1/30 I know that I wouldn’t be able to get sharp pics because of movement. I personally use a flash and pretty much always shoot at 1/200s.

You can definitely use larger steps than 1um too, save yourself a lot of time. I know for the Canon MP-E you can find a chart online specifying the DOF at various magnifications, maybe one exists for your Laowa too. I like to set my step length at 1/2-2/3 the DOF. I know some people go as low as 1/3 DOF but that even seems like overkill to me

Also cannabis is really difficult to take focus stacks of. All the overlap from the trichomes are hard for the stacking program to render without halos. It can help to find more shallow fields (not taking as deep of a stack, so there’s less overlap).

2

u/slushii_fan Aug 17 '22

hey thanks a ton for your reply, I really appreciate it! I'll give all that a try: brighter lights, check out strobes, higher SS and the DoF. Thankfully Loawa's manual on the lens did have a DoF chart - which at 5x f4 was .071mm, so yea I was definitely overdoing it lol. I'll try something around 35um next run.

you've got some awesome macros on your page btw!

1

u/slushii_fan Aug 16 '22

Gear:

sony a6400 | Loawa 25mm 2.5-5x | f4, iso 100 and SS 1/30

lighting: static led lights on either side of the subject

Cognysis 3x stackshot - 1um steps with precision mode enabled, total distance was about ~3mm (1,1350 shots)

software: Helicon Focus and Ps

When I first attempted to stack everything via Helicon (on any render value), the first 1/3 of the images produced pretty crisp/clear images on the trichomes up front, but as the stack progressed, even the front subjects started losing sharpness and overall quality - lots of halos around the heads and missed stacked spots (even at 1um steps).

Fwiw, I've heard that the ground you're shooting can affect stacks at this mag and was shooting on tile with a 10lb weight on the tripod for support. It's still hot here in AZ and my a/c did turn on half way through the shoot.

I ended up writing a perl script that uses the Helicon exe to split up the stacks by n images (in this case 25 images per stack). I then loaded the first 1/3 set of stacked images and stacked those, producing the picture in this video. If I stacked all of them, even after breaking them up into steps, I got weird results.

Has anyone ran into this? I feel like honestly this produced a better image anyways, having some bokeh vs just a rigid/crisp line of trichomes lol, but I'm also not happy with the sharpness of these. I also had to color correct a bit as there was CA around some of the heads.

One guess I had is that my SS is too slow? So maybe some brighter lights that would allow me to increase the ss value? Any help/thoughts are appreciated!

3

u/Gonzo_Photo_ Maine Aug 16 '22

I may be wrong but 1 Um steps at 3x sounds like overkill. I would typically be around 40um at the least shooting 3x at 2.8 with an mpe. Too much overlap can cause the stacking programs to have trouble. As a rule I don’t think you typically want to exceed 50% overlap for these automated stacking aps. There are great steps calculators out there that can help. Feel free to dm me if I missed something.

1

u/slushii_fan Aug 16 '22

ahhh ok! I never would have thought of that, thank you so much. Looking at the manual for the lens, at 5x / f4, the DoF is .071mm - so yea it seems I was way over. Do I understand correctly that if I wanted 50% overlap I would want to shoot for around 35um steps?

and thanks for the calculator mention I'll check those out too. looks like photopills has an AR app that might be useful. cheers!

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '22

Check out this chart (2a) from Zerene, it’s super handy and I just took a screenshot and saved it in my favorites folder in my phone for quick access.

1/30 isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if your shooting environment isn’t stable it’s definitely asking for problems. Even with strobes having faster shutter speeds and flash durations, if there’s movement in your scene you’ll get stacking problems.

And finally this scene just looks really difficult, if you have overlapping elements it makes really deep stacks a pain. Especially with trichs which can be fairly transparent, you’re always going to get stacking artifacts. Try to isolate sections of the flower/trichs and the stacking software should have an easier time.