basic question re: focusing rail

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harry

basic question re: focusing rail

Post by harry »

hi:
1. i'm going to purchase helicon soft and have one question in regards to shoot technique. what is the recommendation in regards to whether or not one should utilize a focusing rail (such as the really right stuff one). my set up is going to be that of a DSLR with a 70mm macro (ie Olympus E-5 with 35mm macro). i've scanned the various articles on helicon focus and some folks note that you can use a focusing rail while most simply recommend manually rotating the focus dial on the lens. the only reason i'm interested in the focus rail is that one can more easily fine tune the focus and do so in consistent increments. on the otherhand, i would think that using a focus rail would confuse helicon focus because the camera is going to be slightly moving on the rail and thus each photo would be slightly different from each other.


thanks for the help. harry shin
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Stas Yatsenko
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Re: basic question re: focusing rail

Post by Stas Yatsenko »

Harry,

The images will be slightly different anyway, when using focus rail or focusing ring. Helicon Focus by default aligns images, so this is not a problem.

I do not have aswer, which technique is better. Focus rails give more control and precision, while focusing ring is easier to use. I think focusing ring will give less scene distortions in the extreme cases, like covering area from 10 cm to 20 cm from the lens. If you move the camera on focusing rails, the view point is changed too much and relative position of the objects changes considerably too. If you use focusing ring, the view point will move only a bit. If you want to cover the area from 10 cm to 10.5 cm, both methods would give identical results.
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