Focus stacking anyone?
I have become more than a little obsessed with this. But, it is just not always possible. When you walk a long way and do that thing, arrive home and find that entire super focused image scene is a bust. It really does blow chunks. So learn to let that go and love everything you do. To hell with focus … almost.
Know your parameters for success. These are changing light and movement, steady in both and a solid tripod is optimal. If you have foliage in part of the image there will likely be movement artifacts in the end product. Movement from the slightest breeze will place a branch in a different location in each focus capture. That’s a bust. Fog and water will give the stacking software more than it can deal with as will fast moving cloud.
That’s a lot right there. I mean it is a tool for macro or product photography, where conditions are strictly controlled. So venturing into the wild with this is just plain crazy. But I do it, because when it works it is remarkable. I focus stack and a stitch into panoramas. That is truly insane, not just crazy but fully insane. I find alpine high elevation on a fine day, a definite possibility. There are a number of examples in my collection.
Fairly open aperture can be used sometimes (f5.6-f8) f8 is optimal and pragmatic (greater DOF and less shots), which increases the chance of optimal lens performance. What you end up doing depends on your composition; if you want focused foreground features(s) as well as background in your shot then you have more work to do. There are a number of approaches for methodology. The one most people use these days is selecting features in your scene that you want in clean focus and just shoot them. The outcome could contain sections of less precise focus, which may or may not work - a bust. Others just wing it and the result can even worse.
The tricky thing is that combination of focal length, aperture, sensor size and given the focus point, determine the focus band (front focus zone start and rear focus finish - band of focus). This provides a band of focus into your scene, as a starting shot. Your task is to create enough of these focus bands to paint focus from front to back. Then of course you must put them together in post-process. All of this is non-trivial.
And the it gets it really gets difficult. This shifting focus to next required focal point is non-linear. So where do you focus to and how do you determine precise focus at that focus distance? Good question. Neither of the methods above address this difficulty, they will not complete the cover. There are a number ways to approach this. The first is to track down manufacturer data, as a chart perhaps, that gives you enough information to calculate the next focus point to set with your somewhat coarse manual focus ring. This is of course not very precise so you must introduce compensation by shooting more images, so the likelihood of good overlap is increased. A lot of work.
Focus peaking helps.
The next method is using hypothetical historic estimates of data to use for the process. Then compensate as above and you may get a good result.
My current approach was to buy every Zeiss lens I could, because they are sharp, have excellent contrast … and they have a little LCD on the lens that gives you focus distance, front and rear focus point … and peaking. Job done.
The major companies will never implement this workflow. It actually would not be costly, but it would not be a big selling point, in these times. Think about it. The communication between camera body and lens has never been more comprehensive. Everything in this process could be automated. But it will never happen. Sigh
Is Focus Stacking worth it? It’s not for everyone. But for me it gets me closer (when possible) to achieving a faithful reproduction of the wonder I see that takes me out of myself. For me, yeah. Hell yes.