I was going to put this in Open Talk, then figured nobody but Sony people would care. So it's here. If you want to do close-up imaging with an Alpha 1, this is one way - if y'all see things in what I'm doing that have a better way to be done, let me know.
For the last 6 years, I’ve done my focus stacking with a Nikon D850. It works very well – simple, quick, easy, good results.
With the D850 (and I think some of the others), you pick the number of shots, size of the interval between them (Nikon uses a scale from 1 to 10, but NO units to give you a clue what 1 or 5 or 10 means), focus on the starting point, and push the button. Camera does the rest. One problem is your interval can leave gaps between the areas of sharp focus. And yes, they’re quite visible when you render the stack. Another problem is you’re guessing how many images you’ll need. Too many and you can throw away the one’s beyond where you want to stop. Too few and you pick a higher number and try again. So it’s FAR from being a precise process.
Prior to that I used Helicon Remote with a Nikon d300, and it IS a precise process. But, it was VERY SLOW, as in around 5 – 6 SECONDS between EACH shot… BUT, it did let you set the starting and ending points, so it was better than the D850 in that respect. And it TOLD you how many images it would capture for the distance it needed to cover based on camera and focal length and aperture and so on. It also used your tablet for all the controls, so you had a big screen instead of the camera’s LCD (a big, rather lo-res screen). The bad thing is you had to cable the tablet to the camera and take the tablet along… So, as with EVERYTHING in photography, everything is both good and not so good.
I’m now shooting an Alpha 1, which lacks the built-in capability provided by the extremely old now (I figure digital years are like dog years, so around 40 years old), D850. And, so far Heliconsoft still doesn’t have Helicon Remote working perfectly for the Alpha 1 – though this may have changed since the last time I checked.
BUT, with the recommendation(s) in one of the forums, I’ve found it can be done reasonably well, at least for close-up imaging…
The recommendation was to use the Bluetooth remote, which has a button to change the focus point toward or away from the camera. Which is pretty much all you’re doing when focus stacking close-up. And yeah, it’s a kludge, but I sometimes stumble on subjects I’d like to photograph when I DON’T have the D850 with me.
The advantage to using the remote versus using your hand to change the focus point manually is you can get smaller, more consistent intervals between shots. I’m not sure how many of you have hands so precise you can manually focus in millimeters or even an eighth of an inch, but I definitely can’t. Same advantage as when the camera has built-in focus stacking.
So, with the Alpha 1, a Tamron 50-400, and a pair of extension tubes (10 and 16mm) I started playing. And ended up with this setup… It’s working, but again, if any of y’all have ideas to improve it, let me know.
What I did was set up my #3 Shooting mode for close-up
• Aperture mode, Auto-ISO off
• Customize the Movie button (4 on Rear 1 screen) to AF/MF Selector Toggle to toggle between AF-S and MF. When the camera is in MF, you can switch between that and AF-S.
• Program the Left (3 on the Rear2 screen) on the control wheel to turn on Focus Magnifier.
• Turn off Face/Eye AF, Tracking and SteadyShot (camera’s on a tripod)
• Turn on Focus Peaking display, set it to High, and select whatever color you want.
• In Focus Assistant, set
o Auto Magnify in MF to on
o Focus Magnifier Time to No Limit
o Initial Focus Mag to 1.0X or 4.2X (if you’re using crop sensor mode I think it’s 2.6X)
o AF in Focus Mag to On
Once the Focus Magnifier is on you can press the center button on the control wheel to toggle from 1.0X to 4.2X to 8.5X. It doesn’t STAY on, so after going to 8.5X it turns off the magnification and you have to hit the left side of the control wheel to turn it back on.
• Pair the Bluetooth remote with the camera – I bought an inexpensive JJC Bluetooth remote, and so far it works fine. I didn’t want to spend $80 for a remote and have this not work.
Find a suitable subject.
The first thing I want to do is find the closest point on the subject. If you put the AF in Wide mode, then toggle the camera to AF-S (Movie button on mine), you can get a pretty good idea of what’s closest - that appears to be what Wide mode does – focus on whatever is closest. If that’s too wide, switch to Zone and put the Zone where the closest point most likely is. It’s not perfect, and you can always toggle back to manual mode and find the closest point you want sharp manually, but MOST of the time the camera does a pretty good job of getting ON or CLOSE TO the right spot.
Toggle back to MF and when you rotate the focus you should be in magnification mode and have 4.2X to help you get the right spot in focus. You should see the focus peaking move as you move the focus manually, so I watch the focus peaking and try to set it so I’m focused at the back edge of the depth of field (the DOF is going to make things at and in front of where I’m focused sharp.) I’d rather capture an extra image and toss it in post than to miss the sharpness at the closest point.
Using the remote, capture your first image.
Press the “T” button to move the focus point away from the camera. I’ve been finding that somewhere between 3 and 5 times to work reasonably well with my setup, but it’s easy to experiment using a ruler to get a feel for how far “x” presses will move the focus for whatever lens setup you’re using.
Shoot your next picture.
Repeat the above 2 steps until you’ve covered the distance you want.
Done…
I’ve found that I can watch the peaking move as the camera focus changes, so you can usually/sometimes tell when you’ve covered enough distance.
One nice thing about doing this using the remote is if you get a breath of wind that moves your subject you can wait ‘til it’s still again before shooting the next image.
I sometimes use the manual focus with magnification to focus out to where I want to end and make a mental note of approximately where that is – the focus distance scale on the screen is NOT very useful because it only indicates HUGE focus movements. It’ll say 1M, then after moving a bunch 2M, but nothing in between. If you're close enough it goes in tenths of a meter, but 3+ inches is a HUGE distance when your DOF is 3/32".
