DEBUNKING The WORST Focus Stacking MYTHS | How to Master Sharp Photos in Landscape Photography
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ธ.ค. 2022
- In this video I go over 2 common myths many people get wrong about focus stacking in landscape photography. #focusstacking #landscapephotography
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Couldn't agree more. Hyperfocal bollocks.
Hey where is the hyperfocal distance?
Me: “Bend over I’ll show you.” 🤣
@@PereaPhotography I can't even find a tape measure on my building site let alone my bloody camera bag FFS!
There are places for hyper focal and there are places for focus stacking sometimes focus stacking won't work in certain situations as well. Especially if something is moving. If you've got a tree or a plant in front of you, that's moving in the wind it's gonna look crap when you go to stack it, it will look out of focus because it's moving so that doesn't work very well either. So there are times when single shot is better and there are times when hyper Okul method works and there are times when we need to stack and it is working out which one we need to use. And yes I'm a professional photographer in Australia and I saw a lot of images and I teach Photography as well and I will be launching my own TH-cam channel soon, I like your channel as well, and I've subscribed as well love your humour, but I don't think we can just blatantly say that hyper focal is bollocks because that is rubbish in my opinion
I am a retired commercial photographer. This was a very fine presentation and fits totally into my experiences, including what a wide-angle lens is good at and what it is not good at.
Great video! Good to see someone talking about focus stacking in more than a simplistic manner. I understand your point about hyperfocal distance being hard to determine. What hyperfocal distance has really shown me, is that if you are close to your foreground it makes a lot more sense to take three or so shots for the foreground and a mid ground shot, rather than the traditional foreground mid ground and background shot. Great video!
Thanks John!
Good and very educational video! Keep up the good work!
Great explanation! Spot on thank you for the clearly explained info,
I love this location. Great shots and video Mike!
Super simple clear and great advice, thanks!
Completely agree brother. If I ever have an image where I still can't get everything in focus at F11, then I'll usually open back up to F8 and focus stack. The degradation of quality on anything above F16 with my lenses is very obvious. Great video mate :)
Thanks for the great video! I love shooting wide angle. I have used focus stacking many times, and it was nice to see another perspective.
Interesting and informative Mike, thanks for taking the time to explain. Three Sisters Summit is always a great background and tough hike. See ya in the next one.
This is a very helpful and well done video. The final image is just gorgeous. It's taken a couple of years, but I have come to understand in order to create "next level" images you must be willing to focus stack. Happy New Year to you and Chris.
Thank you so much, as always Richard!
Very helpful indeed . Thank you . Have a great New Year.
Thanks dave! Same to you!
Hi mate , another great informative video. All the best to you both in 2023 , Kevin
A good informative video! Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year!
Thanks buddy and to you as well!
Great stuff as always!!!
Glad you enjoyed!
here, here! Well said
Excellent and very accurate info that was well presented! Thanks!
Thanks Randy!
A great explanation of how Fstop works. Thanks
Thank you so much for this clear explanation of wide angle lenses and focus stacking! Answers many questions for me. 👍
Thats great to hear! Thanks for watching!
A very well followed YT landscaper once did a video where he made the decision to focus stack. Except he stayed at f/16, his typical setting for unstacked landscapes. I asked the question in his feed, since he decided to stack, why not open up to the sweet spot of his lens, say f/8, and go from there. Who cares if you’re stacking two, four or seven shots once the decision is made.
He didn’t answer.
I agree with your thoughts and appreciate your tips on stretching perspective.
Yeah that’s a head scratcher for sure. Thanks for watching and I’m glad you enjoyed the video!
Brian thanks for the tip I am going to try that the next time I am out and see if there is a huge difference between shooting at say f16 and f8 thanks a bunch
Wow! Now I know how to use a wide angle lens correctly. Thanks! Came here after reading the comments about f22 on your shorts video. I was also surprised to read those comments.
Great explanation too bad social media accepts sub par results
Any lens has one distance that is truly sharp. Depth of field has been through history referred as many things like zone of sharpness and acceptably sharp. and within the circle of confusion. These terms often get abbreviated and I think this adds to the misunderstanding. In film days we used F22 because that was the best option then, unless you had a view camera and could use the tilt and shift functions to get the plane of focus where you wanted. NOW we have better tools that are very user friendly to help us achieve our vision. Very good explanation..
Thanks Steve. Yes thats exactly right. So many things get conflated, but with technology constantly improving, it is becoming much easier to get images right from a technical perspective.
Tilt-Shift lenses?
@@thomastuorto9929 More often used for View Cameras but some were made for SLRs. A way to move the plane of focus so it is not exactly parallel to the film plane/ sensor. The lenses are moved independent of the camera body by tilting, shifting or swinging.
@@stevethompson8154 Thanks for the reply. I’ll probably rent one this year coming & decide if to purchase. Couldn’t hurt to have in the ole lens collection.
Very good video discussing f-stop vs depth of field. Was glad to see you give a brief nod to large format, since that is is so very different. I have a 150-600 lens with the sweet spot for f-stop is at f11, but as you mentioned the 14-30 is closer to f8. It varies by lens build as much as anything.
Thanks Mike!
Thanks, that stretchiness is one of the appeals of the super-wide angles.
You know there's laser tape measures now, just point and measure without leaving the tripod😉
You should try F32…now that is a REALLY sharp aperture! Hahaha. Hyperfocal distance definition literally has the words “acceptably sharp” in it. Just look up the word acceptable to see how sharp that means! Thanks for the video
Haha true! Thanks for watching!
Im with your wife in this one, nice photo, and a Merry Christmas 🎄 to you and your wife...
Hmm, I couldnt get super close foregound sharp with f22 but comparing to f13 the background did not loose any sharpness at all. Sony A7C + Tamron 28-75mm.
Great infor thank you! Also, where can I find infor regarding your workshops. I didn't see anything on the website
Thanks Robert! At the moment I’m not running any workshops for 2023. It is something I’m considering possibly next year. Cheers!
Does focus stacking still work if the lens has to extend and retract to achieve focus?
If you get really low, yeah hyper focal will not work. I use a GFX system which is even more challenging for this and if you are getting a low shot you will definitely need to stack. However I still think hyper focal can be used in a lot of situations where you don't need to stack I don't necessarily think the mountains in the background need to be Pin sharp - I actually think it gives it a slightly AI, look that I don't particularly like. I think it's horses for courses there will be times when you need to stack, and there will be teams when you don't need to stack. It is really down to the distance of something in the foreground and what you have in the foreground.. There is one exception, GFX cameras, and if you haven't used one, you will be able to shoot at F11 16 even FA with no diffraction if you use good lenses, but that's the exception to the rule, if you are using a crop sensor camera or a full frame camera you actually often have to stack more than you do with the GFX, which is odd, because when I got into GFX, I was told the opposite. I do shoot a lot of single shot very sharp images but here's the kicker. I'm quite happy to accept that the mountain way Off in the background might be a little bit soft I'm okay with that. I call it fall o and it actually looks really nice and this is actually how the human I will see it when you are standing there what we're trying to do, Off and I think is create images that don't look real, and I don't see the point in that. And yes I'm a professional photographer and I sell hundreds of images and I teach landscape photography and like I said, I think there is a place for using stacking and I also think there is a place for hyper focal method. It's working out which one you need to do be. The other thing is unless you've got a decent computer with decent speed. Stacking is a pain in the butt because it will take a long time. And sometimes just crashes and doesn't work. You need at least 16 MB of ram in your computer and then it will work fine, there's a whole bunch of other considerations with stacking and hyper focal method that you didn't mention as well but I'm not gonna go into them as they are quite technical. Thanks for the video mate and I do enjoy your channel.
Where is this location? I went to the peralta trailhead and I still couldn’t find me it. It’s supposed to be in the Easter superstitions.
Can someone help? I’d love the exact location of this mountain peak
You got a subscribe from me on the basis of your no-bullshit approach to hyperfocal distance and f/22 ;) I wish most of the hyperfocal crowd would read up on how it's still calculated on an outdated value of 'acceptably' sharp. In the advanced section in PhotoPills you can adjust the Circle of Confusion setting down a fair whack to get more realistic values... but I still hardly ever use them.
Solid advice. Lots of noise in comments haha
Haha yeah it’s the Wild West in the comments 🤣
When you focus stack those multiple pics, how do you deal with the cloud in the sky? I mean, the cloud moves and ends up being different in every pics.. When I try to focus stack them together using Photoshop, the sky always gets messed up.
TIA.
Photoshop does a decent job, not a perfect job. If your exposures are very similar try doing the masking yourself!
I go over f11 and although it's not filthy dirty and is cleaned reasonably regularly, my images are full of dust spots which just makes editing even longer. All of my landscape images are f8 with 3 or 4 focus points depending on the scenes main subject of interest, are they perfect probably not but from normal viewing distance you can't tell
Thanks Rob!
@@PereaPhotography no worries Mike, keep up the great content and merry Christmas to you both
f22? Great for the pinhole photography enthusiast I suppose.
A few more comments. A component of the diffraction limit calculation has to do with absolute aperture size, and that’s a different f-stop setting for different sensor sizes. For FF sensors, sure, f8 is optimal. I shoot micro-4/3, f4 is where it’s at.
Another excellent alternative to focus stacking is to use tilt/shift lens. Camera movements is a staple of landscape large format phtography. The only downside for small format digital is that it has traditonally required specialty tilt/shift lenses. This is changing somewhat with the coming availability of t/s adapters.
I think it's more to do with the size of the photosites on the sensor, which is directly related to how many there are on your sensor. Based on that, on my 5DMkII I think f/10 was optimal, and now on my R5 it's more like f/6.3 or somewhere around there. However, I know that some of my lenses are sharpest between f/8 and f/10 ... all else being equal, it's always a compromise between the physics of the lenses vs the physics of diffraction.
As you say Mike, not everyone is into focus stacking but with modern mirrorless cameras like your Z7 and Chris' (and my) R5 and modern software it's so easy to do - if you don't have wind! I'm happy to shoot at f/16 on Canon L lenses as the sharpness of the latest mirrorless lenses is a real step up. Hope you both had a great Christmas Day.
Thanks Steve!!! Those r5’s are pretty sweet!
If its a epic photo. I will focus stack and get everything together in one. If its not but i needed to stack, would probably just throw it away
f22 lol 🤣🤣🤣 great video
🤣👊🏼
I'm in Club Focus Stack, but I lean towards Chris' position re the gear head. 👎🏿😂
What happened to your AF near the end of the video?
Thanks John! That wasn’t an AF issue. That was added in post, but it was accidentally added twice and in the wrong place with no text overlay haha
And I'll make the point in this video you are shooting something that is not moving. If that cactus is moving in the wind, it's not gonna look good it's that simple and you failed to mention that you failed to mention that shooting seascapes is very difficult with stacking because the ocean moves so if you've got a split second between each frame, especially at a one exposure it's not gonna work
"Just use f/22" or the unexpected virtue of ignorance
🤣
Sorry with as much info out there about how to focus stack I am shocked that you got the comments that you did
Thanks Chris! Yeah it is pretty crazy haha.
If you’re going to emphasize the foreground that much, maybe just get a macro lens. I always laugh when people criticize using a wide angle for “trying to fit everything into the frame” and then proceed to use their wide angle lens. Trouble is, they have so much guilt about using it, they’ll belly crawl through the dirt and shoot through a bunch of wildflowers to obscure the mountain that’s right in front of them, thinking somehow that makes for a more interesting composition. Maybe the first time someone did it, but now it’s a tired cliche.
No. Good foreground and good background is epic. Woodland too like old growth
I watched the video and loved it, but I had to watch several times because now I am obsessing over your geared head. It is all I see now. I am trying to understand the efficiency. Is a ball head that bad? It is driving me nuts. Why? Why? So I came up with an idea. Get rid of the tripod altogether. Enter I my newest purchase: Canon EF 70-200 F4 IS. I am just going to handhold a lightweight IS telephoto for a tester. Tripod haters unite - LOL!
Haha I love it! My wife hates the new geared head, but man I love it! So it’s 50/50 lol. If you’re truly curious, I’d imagine Tempe camera might have one to try out!