Manual focus fine-tuning and misleading previews: Am I asking for the impossible?

Oh, OK, I suppose that’s why I get something equivalent-ish to 6.3 while composing. That makes sense, thanks. Kinda funny that the fact that it helps to locate focus is basically a side-effect of the camera trying to gobble more light.

No idea what’s the exact reasoning behind that. But, that mechanism of closing the diaphragm just before actuating the shutter existed already in the film era :smiley:

:laughing:

For the record, here is, after a “quick” post-processing (meaning, with me, “one hour”… :weary:), one of the surviving pics from the series that led me to start this topic. F6.3, max zoom, ISO auto → 100, and close as hell… The metadata states that the depth of field is “0.004 m (0.893 − 0.897 m)”. :woman_facepalming:

I kinda like this shot (by my beginner’s standards), but I had to trash one half of the attempts, as I said. And even on that one, I think the head could have been sharper.

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You have had some great replies and I agree with all them. There is no one single answer to your problem.

As for focusing I would definitely stick with manual focusing using a mixer of focus ring and fine tuning or maintaining focus by moving back and forth to keep the subject focused. The only time I would consider auto focus would be if the camera was tripod mounted and then I would happily use the touch screen auto focus. In the sample you showed touch the position of the insect. Focus should then be great. Touch screen auto focus is great with a tripod for all kinds of subjects including landscapes.

I don’t recommend your auto focus/manual focus tweak method with macro as it is most likely the camera will shift position before you capture the image. I confess I have a Canon R7 and have successfully used this method many times myself but wouldn’t use it for macro unless tripod mounted. With this method of manual fine tuning of focus I have set one of my custom dials to use back button auto focus to remove focusing from the shutter button. This works brilliantly for wildlife photography. It is a lovely feature of the Canons and other brands.

I really love the suggestion of focus stacking which is a whole topic on its own. Whenever I run a macro workshop I teach students about focus stacking. In my day job I am a scientist and we use software to focus stack microscope images all the time because of the very shallow depth of field with microscopes. My favourite free software for this sort of stacking is CombineZP. Works great with photos.

As for aperture I would be wanting to use like F16, F22 or maybe smaller. Forget diffraction issues as focus is more important. However sometimes shallow depth of field may be desirable in a macro but usually depth of field has become your enemy in a macro. The challenge of such small apertures is of course light.

Small apertures mean less light. Higher ISO will help facilitate this and with your camera the ISO will be able to be pushed higher than a 20 year old digital camera. On my Canon R7 I sometimes max out the ISO to 32000. I don’t recommend it but darktable does a good job of producing a reasonable image from these occasions. So don’t overthink ISO, noise or diffraction.

I love the Fv mode for Canon. I use it extensively. I set an aperture and shutter speed. I then set auto ISO and set exposure bracketing to +/- 1.67 EV and I can be very confident of getting a good exposure without fluffing around which can be important for wildlife, streetscape and travel photography. Also good for macro.

However to avoid the need for crazy high ISO settings we need light and lots of it. Direct sunlight technically can be good for this but artistically may be too harsh for some images. One solution I use is a flash mounted on my hot shoe and tilted about 45 degrees. I then bounce the light off a reasonable size white card attached to the flash. I have a piece of white foam like material in my camera bag for this and an elastic band. This lighting provides a very bright soft light that looks like skylight falling from above. It produces no harsh shadowing but still retains a 3D feel. It would have been ideal for the attached image you posted.

Some photographers like to use a ring flash. These are very effective but I don’t personally like the lighting that they produce. They are great for forensic images and scientific records but I don’t like them artistly because the light is direct and doesn’t produce nice shadows (just my opinion).

One final suggestion I have is to move in close and take the image. Then back away with the camera a little and refocus and take the image. Repeat this a couple of times and then back at home crop the images and see which gives the best compromise of pixel count and depth of field. Many times it is better not to fill the frame and to crop later to get the best looking image. Pixel count is not everything.

This thread has inspired me to do one of my macro photography workshops in the near future. Thanks

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That’s often the case. :laughing: In France many people like to start sentences with “The problem is that” even for complex political stuff, and I can’t help sometimes telling them “Man, you’re oversimplifying things; say ‘One of the issues is that’ ”.

Huuuum, so:

  • either I have wrong assumptions about the auto-focus process,
  • or I failed to clearly express what I’ve been doing (which would hardly be surprising since I’m having a hard time finding the right English terms for some concepts I primarily discovered in French).

I assumed that:

  • the “One-shot AF then manual” process provided a starting point for the focal length, while fully manual focus forces me to hunt for this starting point myself by turning the ring like a madman, sometimes having close to no idea where the focus stands at a given time;
  • once the “One-shot AF” part is done and gives way to the manual step, I can still choose any focal length I wish, even if it ends up having nothing to do with the starting point suggested by the AF.

Furthermore, I don’t let the AF pick the subject on its own: I generally use one of the two narrowest AF area modes (Spot AF or 1-point AF) and place it where I want it manually (generally with the 8-directional pseudo-joy-stick thingy because I find it hard to use the touch screen while keeping that heavy lens horizontal-ish).

Given that, I don’t quite see what the downsides are, but I guess I’m overlooking stuff.

Cannot that also be the case for fully manual focus?

Does “this” refer to getting rid of AF, or the opposite (retaining quick access to it via another button)? The former would make me think: “Doesn’t wildlife get away sometimes while you’re fiddling with manual focus?”

Seems to be Windows-only, and the latest stable release appears to be from 10+ years ago (according to Wikipedia). Found similar scripts and stuff for Linux with a quick search, but I don’t know how well they would handle the raw conversion, nor if they output yet another raw or if they spit a JPG and call it a day. Well, anyway, not sure I want to invest myself in that topic, at least not right away. Already lots of stuff to ingest. And a tripod seems mandatory for that. I just took like 300 pictures with my R6m2, and many of them were to troubleshoot a white balance bug in RT. :laughing: But that’s interesting for sure.

But that can’t get rid of the direct sunlight, right? Unless you block / filter it with a black or translucent reflector? Or perhaps you then dial down your camera to make it look less harsh and then let your flash do the job? I’m a bit confused, as for years I just dealt with whatever the sun gave me without really fighting back. I still haven’t tried my silver / white reflector either – I suspect that in many cases it could yield something more pleasant that my LEDs, but it seems harder keep it well positioned without a proper stand (or assistant :laughing:).

In many instances I won’t be shooting natural stuff but rather 1:6–1:10 scale figures, so “no harsh shadowing but still retains a 3D feel” speaks a lot to me (hate to get one side of the face drowned in shadows, and having no shadows is hardly better), but I then need the light to come more from the side than directly from above (I think).

I watched a few “ring vs. LED panel” videos before buying my tiny panel and I got to roughly the same conclusion. It looked too uniform to my tastes. Plus, it felt less portable, so…

I think I’ve been unconsciously starting to do this, but partly for a different reason: sometimes you eventually realize that the surrounding environment is not that bad after all and that showing a larger area could be great. Especially with the aforementioned figure shots, for which I have the luxury of choosing where I place them and which objects I scatter around them, etc. So that technique kills two birds (possibly more) with one stone, so to speak.

Yep. Before buying that camera I ran a quick web search to see which resolutions where advised as minimums when printing photos (and I’m not even there yet… Never printed anything), and it turns out that you generally don’t need that many pixels. Well, I still got scared by the lower resolution of the R6 Mark I and preferred its successor, but…

Kinda funny that you thank me after this. I guess that’s the photography equivalent of Rubber duck debugging - Wikipedia. Will the workshop start with my insect picture, captioned with “WHAT YOU SHOULD NOT DO”? :rofl:

More shooting this afternoon (while a cake was cooling down).

  • If the weather gets cloudy as hell, sure, ISO will jump up to compensate, but it won’t save me from a terrible dullness. :laughing: (I have yet to see what I can do with post-processing, but pretty sure I’ll just trash some of those.)
  • If I have too many items and props to worry about, I get proportionately clumsier.
    • Right at the beginning of the session, my camera (attached to a sling thingy) slid away from my right side, and the lens’ side came bumping sideways against my left kneecap. Relatively softly, as it was still hanging to the sling rather than in a free fall, but still.
    • That’s been haunting me ever since, and now I’m anxiously checking the corners of my pictures to see if anything seems distorted. :sweat_smile: I dare hope that this bulky lens can take way more than that, especially if the stabilization system allows the internal components to “float” to some extent. The fact that the zoom was fully retracted rather than extended maybe helped too. :crossed_fingers:
    • Long story short: I’m not very confident in my ability to handle too much stuff at once during a shooting, especially outdoors. :sweat_smile:
  • Since I’m often shooting stuff that is more or less at the ground’s level, I sometimes sit or lay down, so I can control my “back and forth physical movement to fine-tune the focus” way better than while standing. I even ended up sitting on the chair that I had initially summoned as a makeshift reflector stand.
  • Had to give up the EVF and use the orientable screen in weird positions when the camera was almost on the floor itself. Not the best to check focus. Had to boost its brightness, which can lead to false expectations regarding picture exposure.
  • The EVF does not show the picture that has been taken, unlike the screen. Maybe there’s a setting for that. But if I move away from the EVF, the screen “catches up” and shows it, even if I’m a few seconds late to do so. That’s rather neat, especially to check potentially overexposed (blinking) pixels.
  • Shooting in a rush while the sun is going down (and battling with clouds) and while a cake is waiting for the finishing touches is not a very good idea.

Apart from the fact that I still kinda suck at managing lighting (probably did as much bad as good with my reflector tucked against a plastic chair or plants, but that’s a different topic), focus seems to be much less of a problem now, as long as I don’t push things too far again.

Make good friends with the histogram in your camera (note that it is based on the JPEG that your camera produces rather than the raw file, but it is much better than nothing). It’s much better than trying to judge exposure by eyeing either the viewfinder or the LCD screen. Also, if your camera offers it, you can turn on “zebras” or “blinkies” to make overexposed spots obvious.

I learned that through the “setup tips” that I read at some point, yeah. Hence the “neutral” picture style, to avoid skewing stuff needlessly. But I don’t display the histogram on the screen while shooting. Perhaps I should. I find it bulky, even with the settings to make it smaller. And there seems to be no set rule that allows to say whether an histogram is “good”.

Yep, I have that on (yet another tip from the thing I read). It only shows clipped whites (not blacks), but it’s still cool. It works both when reviewing all pictures and on the “right after the shot” preview. Not sure it’s possible to have this before the shot, though. I guess that’s where the histogram is supposed to help. I’ll try to display it at some point I suppose.

I can relate… Doing tripod work with remote shutter etc. I struggle to get into the “flow” I enjoy so much when shooting with a minimal set up. Tripod, tripod sling, camera bag, lens caps, white balance card, camera, lens. camera strap, eyeglasses. I always feel I’m spending all my time trying to manage stuff.

Nice result! Looking very good.

I know this doesn’t help, but you’re well on your way - anything new always takes a while to get good at. You’re obviously getting a very good understanding of the finer points of your new camera, and being willing to do that is half the battle!

The thing with flash is that it’s of a short and fixed duration…so with flash, your exposure is no longer effected by shutter speed (*). And flash is bright. So you can set your exposure to something that will hopefully render even the sunlit areas somewhat dim, while the flash will be brighter, providing the main illumination.

*The subject is complicated by shutter sync speed, meaning that without a High Speed Sync (HSS) flash, you can’t use shutter speeds faster than something like 1/200 (depends on camera).
But don’t worry about all this at present - it’s a bit of a subject in itself, only relevant for using flash.

That was what I suspected, but it’s hard to properly imagine without seeing it at work. :laughing: Thanks for confirming.

That sounds inconvenient indeed. This afternoon I was constantly at 1/800. Still a bit random as I’m not yet sure what I need to avoid motion blur with my zoom and stuff; this may have been slightly overkill.

Thanks :laughing: Note that this was before this discussion, though. Otherwise the poor insect’s body probably wouldn’t be that blurry. :melting_face:

Hello again from the opposite side of the world (Tasmania, Australia).

I personally stick to manual focus for macro work. I looked at the figurine shot you linked to. With this sort of work a tripod would be great. The subject is not running away anywhere or even blowing in the wind.

I have set up my Canon R7 to do MF peaking and activated the focus guide when using MF. The peaking if especially helpful in quickly checking that the subject remains in focus if the camera shifts or the zoom is shifted. The focus guide is three triangles that line up when the focus point is in focus. This is all very fast to use and with still life shots speed is not important anyway. If I did not have focus peaking and focus guides activated I would struggle with manual focus, so they are critical guides for me.

I interpreted from what you have written that you will focus and then shift the focal length. This can be a problem. If you focus at a shorter focal length and then zoom in you go from longer depth of field (DoF) to much shorter DoF and this could cause you to lose focus. However if you zoom all the way in the depth of field is very short and focus is critical. Then when you zoom out depth of field increases and small focus errors may be forgiven. Certainly focus is less critical at shorter focal lengths.

This is a method I used in the 1980’s as an early adopter of zoom lenses for wedding photography (yes I am that old). This method was great. However, over the years many zoom lenses were designed to shift focus as the focal length changed and this method just didn’t work with these lenses. It in fact caused out of focus pictures. So I abandoned this method. You need to confirm that focus doesn’t shift as you move from the longest focal length to the shortest focal length. You should never move from short to long focal lengths as focus is likely to be lost regardless.

Inspired by your post here I grabbed my R7 with the 18-150mm lens attached. Much to my surprise focus held from 150 to 18mm, so I am stoked that I can again use this great method for manual focusing with this lens. I will check my other lenses later as well.

However, if you want to use auto focus followed by the manual checking then consider the advantage that using separate buttons for shutter release and focusing can bring to still life shots when using a tripod. Having a dedicated focus button allows you to autofocus, manual check the focus and then take your hands off the camera. Then when you push the shutter button the focus will not change. However, link the focus to the shutter button and once you release the half pressure on the shutter button and then reapply the autofocus then refocuses undoing all your efforts.

So separate buttons (back button focusing) can be helpful in a limited number of circumstances. I would never use it as my default everyday method. It can be helpful when stalking wildlife that is grazing and not moving very much. It would be useless for wildlife that is running. But for your figurine shots it would be helpful.

My advice about sunlight needs to be clarified. Often our macro subjects are simply not in the direct sunlight. They may be in a rainforest or other dim lighting scenario. If they are in direct sunlight and you have the luxury of having a diffuser that can be placed between the sunlight and the subject producing a nice soft directional lighting. With your figurines you have the luxury of placing them where you want. I might consider in the open shade, using the light coming through a window, or photographing on overcast days or out at least out of direct sunlight.

The flash setup I suggested is very convenient to use as I only need a flash attached to the camera and bouncing off a white card. If the subject was already in sunlight then I probably don’t need flash so the discussion of getting rid of sunlight was not something I expected. My flash setup works great in a rainforest to photograph fungi and other subjects in the dim light.

With extreme close ups like a bee on a flower you tend to want to increase DoF by closing the aperture a long way down. With the figurines you are photographing they are probably much bigger than a bee and therefore you will not be as close and depth of field will be less of an issue. I would say that shallow depth of field to blur the background behind the figurine would be desirable.

I hope both your cake and photoshoot went well.

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Found similar scripts and stuff for Linux with a quick search, but I don’t know how well they would handle the raw conversion, nor if they output yet another raw or if they spit a JPG and call it a day.

Note that from RT (and I guess DT too) you can export in tiff format which is lossless and can have as much bit depth as the raw. Then you can run the blending script and/or any other postprocessing on the tiffs, and distill down to jpeg only as the very last step.

That was with my old camera. I think I was using my tiny gorillapod, or at least resting my elbows on a stone pillar. Not quite sure what I should get to be able to shoot stuff at ground level with the much heavier new camera. A guy at the shop showed me tripods that can be reversed (like, basically going down from the intersection of the feet instead of up), but it did not seem particularly convenient. Frankly, I’m thinking about resting the camera on a cushion or stuff like that. Do I really need something perfectly stable when shooting immobile stuff at 1/500–1/1000? And how do you manage the “move backwards or forwards to fine-tune the focus” when on a tripod? Do they allow for such movements without moving the whole tripod itself?

Is “peaking” the on-screen enlargement that shows the relevant area, or something else entirely? As for the guide, I tried activating it the other day, but I got the impression that it simply did nothing in the “One-shot then MF” mode, which is kinda lame. But maybe I screwed up, I dunno. But it sounds convenient; I’ll probably try full MF at some point for still subjects.

Woops I probably messed up even more by trying to explain myself. No, no, I don’t touch the zoom once the trigger has been half-pressed. Just the focus ring. That was what I meant. It did not even cross my mind to try fiddling with the zoom at such a point – God knows what would happen haha.

Wut so it kinda serves a purpose after all? That sounds so experimental. :laughing:

My last attempt at sheep was pretty terrible already. :laughing:

Yesterday it was basically alternating without those two conditions without warnings, and I was struggling. Either clipped whites, on not much contrast. I’d need a proper-ish stand to use the translucent version of my reflector rather than trying to make light bounce on the white or silver version. A couple of hours ago I did cloudy+LED and it was OK-ish I think (I have yet to actually check the result on PC though).

Oh OK. My mindset was still stuck in the context of the insect from earlier, which was just waiting outside the house. While I doubt I’ll ever set foot in a RAINforest, I do sometimes get dimmer environments.

It’s pretty variable. Sometimes I try a close-up of the face, etc. And yeah I need to find a good balance regarding depth. Sometimes my “scenery” is not that great, and blurriness can help to hide the fact that there’s random stuff (a car or whatever) polluting the view, while in other cases I want to show what I put behind to some extent. Well, much like in most kinds of pictures I suppose. :upside_down_face: Nothing revolutionary here. But the habits I had with the other camera have to be re-learned to “guess” the suitable numbers faster.

The cake was OK, thank you. :drooling_face: Almost dead already.

Hum I think that my impression of having “perfect preview yet out-of-focus result” may have been due, in part, to the fact that basically I was thinking “OK, from this point, if I turn the focus ring in one way or the other – even by the smallest amount I can manage –, things get worse, so I suppose my current position is optimal”. Now I realize that this “pseudo-optimum” can actually be improved by the physical movements you advised.

Oh I did not think about doing this in that order. I guess it’s possible, yeah, and the same processing parameters could be applied on each to ensure consistency. Thanks.

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At shutter speeds like that you would not need a tripod to prevent movement, but those shutter speeds seem excessive and may mean that you are forcing yourself to compensate with increased ISO or large apertures. 1/125th or 1/250th would be very conservative and safe shutter speeds unless wide apertures were required to achieve shallow DoF.

It is something totally different. Peaking is only available in full manual focus. It puts a colored edge on in focus subjects. I set mine to yellow but the default is probably red. Also the manual focus triangle guides I speak of are only available when selected through the menu as an option and then only when in true manual mode.

If a lens will hold focus as you shift from the longest focal length to a wider focal length it is brilliant. The only experimental thing about it is checking if the lens shifts focus with zooming out. When zoomed in the camera is focusing with the aperture wide open and with shorter DoF making focus critical. When you zoom out DoF increases ensuring better focus. Also if the aperture is not maxed out the aperture closes when taking the shot giving further increase to DoF and making focus less critical. It works brilliantly. However, many modern zooms do shift focus making this not a universal solution.

Yes, the diffuser function is often way better than the reflector option.

I am glad the cake went well.

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Taking this discussion of moving the camera vs focusing the lens to an extreme…

I’ve been tinkering with a little project taking photos of vintage electronic parts. (yep, dull I know!).

The most recent set of pics included some relatively tiny parts:


This transistor is about 18mm tall, so to fill the frame I used an extension tube between the camera and lens - this both increases the magnification and reduces the lens’ minimum focusing distance… and also makes the depth of field even tinier! The depth in focus is only 1mm or so, in spite of the f16 aperture.

Anyway, logically I should have used a tripod or other support, but it wasn’t handy. :neutral_face:
So I just winged it, bracing myself against the table. But I found that the process of turning the ring on the lens (manual lens, no AF) was hard to do without actually moving the camera ever so slightly, which was enough to defocus it slightly. So I just focused approximately, then moved myself and the camera to get it right.

And then I usually had to try a good few times to get it right!

The lighting is courtesy of a speedlight left of camera, diffused and reflected by strategic pieces of paper on both sides. That meant I didn’t need to worry about motion blur at least, as electronic flash is of an extremely short duration (ironically, that’s why one mustn’t set the shutter speed too high), and the camera was set to 1/180th and ISO100 which with the f16 aperture meant natural light was not a factor in the image.

(the whole thing was complicated by the fact that there’s no aperture control through my extension tubes - so I had to open the aperture with the ring on the lens to focus, then stop it back down to shoot).

I’m not sure now if any of this is of any help, but I thought that perhaps an example situation would be of interest! And I was doing it anyway…

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Another sample situation:
When hiking, I just use my macro lens and a flash, using auto focus. With f14, 1/180th, ISO 100, no tri- or monopod, I made this image of a viola odorata:

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I’m still going through a trial-and-error process since someone (probably you, but this discussion is long now :laughing:) stated at some point, indeed, that the speed should increase when doing something tricky where movements will become far more noticeable. Yesterday I was at 1/640 and ISO oscillated between 800 and 1600. The result is OK-ish but yeah I could probably have used something slower, even for closer shots. In the spur of the moment I often don’t know for sure just how much risks I’m taking with a particular shot.

Oh, I saw that the other day, but in my mixed mode it appeared after the shot, when the final picture is displayed on the screen. Seeing it afterwards isn’t that useful haha. OK, OK.

OK so it wasn’t just me ill-using menu options then.

I suppose that I can check mine’s behavior by half-pressing the trigger, holding it there, and zooming out, and then see whether everything becomes blurry as hell?

Woops, it wasn’t advertised that much in the videos I saw, but perhaps because I was too focused on finding out what each kind (mostly white / silver / gold) was best for. Well, anyway, now that I own a 5-in-1 thingy, I’ll be able to try myself and see how it turns out.

Gosh xD

Yeah, even my simple test with the graduated ruler was annoying because the ring was kinda acting like a wheel, grinding against the surface the camera was laying on. :sweat_smile:

I like the result a lot. It could have led me to believed that the depth was more than what you described.

That’s a nice shot. I have no flash nor macro lens at the moment, though. :laughing:

Random stuff that “I was doing anyway” from yesterday:


(Extremely cloudy weather, F9, 1/640, ISO 800, 240 mm (max) but standing further away then cropped a bit.)

The highlights drove me crazy.

  1. I spent 30–40 min on the very last steps of the processing (tone mapping, mostly),
  2. thought I was done,
  3. went to take a shower,
  4. came back,
  5. realized that the legs (although not especially clipped per se) were nearly blinding me,
  6. lowered the exposition (probably making my carefully crafted tone curve suboptimal as a result, but I did not feel like redoing everything) and altered tone mapping and stuff once more,
  7. and then I was vaguely satisfied but frustrated by the fact that fixing those aspects were detrimental to the contrasts on the face.

Losing time by trying to achieve contradictory things (without spamming with the local adjustment module, that I used on both eyes nonetheless, but mostly for fun) is one of my specialties. Really need to see if the diffusing translucent reflector thing can alleviate such highlight-related issues.

Perhaps I’m also too dead-set on using nearly the whole range from black to white. Some pictures probably don’t need anything (or at least anything too large) going all the way up to whites.

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When you have the focus peaking working in manual mode then see if the focus peaking shows that you retain focus. The three triangles should also stay aligned if you have them showing. Also check the shots on a computer screen after you have taken them. The focus on the Canon R7 is very complex and I suspect the R6 is the same. My camera’s menu for AF has six pages to scroll few on the screen. MF settings are also found here, but the camera must be switched to manual focus to see those selections.

Good luck.

Possibly the most stupid of my questions so far, but that’s been nagging me:
If I use MF and blindly line up the triangles, isn’t that (somewhat) equivalent to AF?