Orchid stacked with camera tethered to Helicon Remote

[ashcroft]

I upgraded to Helicon Pro today to get Helicon Remote (I previously only had it as a trial). They are doing a discount at the moment. http://www.heliconsoft.com/helicon-f...icenses-swreg/ The Pro and Premium versions include Remote. The Lite version doesn't.

I tethered the Canon 5D to my desktop PC. Used flash head and also Nissin flash strobe, as shown in setup below. The Nissin has a Rouge Flashbender attached to soften the light. I tried something different here - I placed some green light card with a slit in behind the main flower heads to hide the background, which was messy. I know black backgrounds look good, but sometimes you lose detail in dark stems where it runs into the black. I wanted more separation.

Canon 100mm macro, 1x studio flash head, Nissin flash strobe, ISO100, f/7, 1/125s. 12 shots needed from point A to point B

It's not perfect - I need to work on it. Comments welcome.

setup


flower card


final image

[DanK]

Rob,

I have been experimenting with it also--separately from Helicon Focus, because I use Zerene for stacking and am very pleased with Zerene.

In my last tests, using a similar setup (5D3, 100mm L macro), I found that the default steps were too big, leaving OOF areas. I did a flower with a bunch of anthers because they were not lined up, and the pollen will show even minor focusing problems. I gradually decreased the step size by making the correction factor smaller. .7 almost got it. I am going to try .6 and .5. The thread is here: Test of Helicon remote for stacking.

By default, it moves all of the images to the computer, which is not what I wanted, as I tether a laptop and use a larger desktop for editing. When I set the preferences to save in the camera or only copy to the computer, the software stopped working: it would take the right number of shots, but it would not change focus. When I changed the settings back to the default, it started working again. I wrote them Saturday about this but haven't heard back yet.

Dan

Edit: correction-.6 seems to work fine. See the link above--I'll add the shots