Focus Shift Shooting with the Nikon Z7 and 105mm f/2.8 VR Micro-Nikkor
None of my previous cameras had the focus shift feature so I decided to give it a try today. We had great light and my wife’s flowers are in full bloom and made for good test subjects. There was a very slight breeze but the alignment seems to have done a good job with the slight movement between frames. If you don’t know what focus shift shooting is you can read a bit about Nikon’s implementation here. Essentially, the camera will take a series of exposures while slightly adjusting the focus between each frame. This allows a razor thin plane of focus to actually move through the subject thus getting it all in sharp focus. You need to stack the files into a single image using post processing techniques, today I tried this in Photoshop and Zerene Stacker. I had better results in Photoshop but admittedly I’m a rookie with Zerene.
One thing to note, despite having a very fast computer, processing 30 or so images, each a 45 megapixel raw file, brought the PC to its knees :) Might be time for another upgrade. I did four stacks with Photoshop and I’m sharing my Zerene shots at the end, they have issues.
I think all of the flowers shown here are varieties of dhalia.
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Flower 2
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Flower 3 (my favorite one)
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Black and white conversion. Might need a bit more work but that is all the time I have today for editing :)
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A couple of samples with Zerene. I tried both the DMap and PMax types but preferred the Photoshop stack to either. The DMap one has some very strange artifacts in the OOF areas, no idea why.
