R5 focus bracket

[RogerC]

This works when it can reach infinity, but for a subject with limited depth it just keeps going until the maximum is reached. Why is this?

[IamNic]

Hi @RogerC,

the "R5" is a Canon camera - here you are on the Sony Community.

- Nic

[danardeng]

ahahah, great

I think he mean A7... R5

Here seems that it work fine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR1j2kMzQ4A

[RogerC]

Thanks Nic, sorry about the confusion about the camera. Let me explain more clearly with an example: I put a small curled thread of cotton on a hard plain surface with a very faint texture, focussed on the high point, selected 30 images at a step of 10, set the aperture to 5.6 on Sony’s 90mm macro lens and It took all 30 shots with the focus getting increasingly soft after the texture was sharp, and stabilising at about 10. I guess it is searching for infinity, and as we cannot set an end point the only options are to search the images to delete the totally soft ones, guess how many will be required, or keep to manual selection. So much for artificial intelligence. The video you referenced was for selective sharpness, whereas I want front to back without any hassle.

[danardeng]

Not sure that I’ve understand the difference between your case and the one on the video.

On video is showed how to operate to shot bracketing focus. It means that, yes you collect a series of shots with selective focus plain, but you will have more dof when you’ll combine all the shots in postproduction

[RogerC]

What the lady achieved was sharpness on the two drops of water with the rest out of focus. What I am trying to achieve, using Helicon, is front to back focus on a narrow focus range. I do not have a problem with landscape where it can focus to infinity, usually only a handful of shots.

[danardeng]

You are trying to simulate an hyperfocal condition and don’t have enough steps to go from minimum to maximum focus range?

In that case could be that you must stitch more bracketing sets to find all in focus

[RogerC]

I can get a fully sharp stacked image from the initial few shots, my point is that to do it and avoid filling up my card with useless shots I need to manually weed out those after the far point is sharp. If I put them all through Helicon the file size is unnecessarily large. Until Sony can set a far point I’ll have to continue a manual bracket selection, see https://diglloyd.com/blog/2022/20221205_2032-SonyA7R_V-focus-bracketing.html

[danardeng]

So, the point is not that the focus bracketing doesn’t work on your camera for small distance. The point is that you would like to have an option that actually there is not.

[RogerC]

In so far that the bracketing takes a number of shots at varying focus distances, for at least some of the shots, it does work, but for circumstances I have related as it needs detailed human intervention to select images prior to stacking it is very disappointing. I can only hope Sony will improve it in a firmware upgrade as outlined in the link I sent.