After a youth spent as a voracious slayer of aphids and devourer of mites, this fella is enjoying a more mellow nectar-sipping adulthood. Next, I found this live, but sluggish Green Lacewing.
#HELICON FOCUS REVIEWS SOFTWARE#
I then took the shots and processed them in both Zerene Stacker and Helicon Focus (more on this software later). A few seconds later had my folder of shots. Though the shutter itself is completely silent, there is a single small thunk as the mirror flips up (the same sound you hear when you enable live view – if you are already in live view you won’t hear this) then a tiny repetitive noise from the lens focus motor as it chugs along from shot to shot. I hit start and three seconds later the D850 started shooting (this delay allows any camera shake to subside and is a default value you can’t change). Programming the settings is very quick using the touch screen instead of scrolling with the camera buttons.
#HELICON FOCUS REVIEWS MANUAL#
As I was shooting in manual with a steady light source I did not enable exposure smoothing. I was too lazy to set up a tripod so I just propped the D850 up on a few books, turned VR off and pointed the lens at the moth.
#HELICON FOCUS REVIEWS PLUS#
I shot RAW plus JPEG fine and used the JPEGs to stack the images shown here (the D850 is new enough that Lightroom doesn’t support its RAW images yet, but should in a few weeks when I can go back and use my RAW files). I set the time between shots at 0 seconds and enabled silent mode so as not to wake the dead. I used the Nikon 105mm f/2.8G VR macro lens set to f/11, and took 50 exposures with the shift set at 2 (from a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being a greater shift). I manually focused on the nearest part of the moth and just guessed at some settings. The moth looked a tad moth-eaten, but he was glad to stay still atop the light table for as long as it took. Much better to find your subjects early on a cold morning before they get moving or if you want a dead bug find one that reached the end of its life span naturally.īut I digress.
I absolutely detest this practice as well as putting bugs in the freezer to slow them down (something I tried once with tragic consequences for the poor tarantula and regretted so much I gave up on bug photography). I state this because there is a despicable trend of bug photographers going out and killing their subjects just to take a photo of them. Sounds great, so how does it work in practice? Let’s check it out. With focus stacking, you set the number of exposures you want, the time between shots, and the amount of shift between shots and the D850 does all the refocusing for you and puts the exposures into one separate folder for ease of use later when stacking in third party software. So I was excited when Nikon incorporated a focus stacking feature (which Nikon wrongfully called “focus shift” in the camera menu – see what Focus Shift actually stands for in photography!) in the Nikon D850. Never enough depth of field and if you wanted to focus stack it was very time-consuming and tedious to refocus either with the lens or a macro-rail. It was fun exploring a world that I couldn’t see with my bare eyes, but technically bug photography was a pain in the butt. This section has been written by John “Verm” Sherman.īefore I got hooked on the hernia-inducing joy of hand-holding super-telephoto glass, I went through a brief infatuation with macro photography.
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