The prefect model Railroad camera?

[Chris333]

I can get it to take photos and I can touch the screen to make it focus on different areas. But all this gives me is a bunch of photos with different focuses. I can do that without this app.

And I did "focus bracketing", it took 3 photos in a row , but none of them were in focus at all.


The first video I clicked on showed the guys using another program on his computer to combine the images.

[Chris333]

I saved the site with the free stacking. I'll try it tomorrow. Thanks.

[peteski]

I can get it to take photos and I can touch the screen to make it focus on different areas. But all this gives me is a bunch of photos with different focuses. I can do that without this app.

And I did "focus bracketing", it took 3 photos in a row , but none of them were in focus at all.


The first video I clicked on showed the guys using another program on his computer to combine the images.

Yes, that is how it works Chris.  The phone's camera just takes bunch of photos, each focused at specific distance (leaving everything else blurry).  The phone does not create the final image. You copy that series of photos and feed them to a focus stacking program on your computer which extracts the focused areas from each photo in the stack and combines them into focused image.

[Chris333]

Good idea for an app 

[Chris333]

Set it to Focus bracketing, choose 10 pictures and put it on timer with 5 or 10 seconds.  Mount it to a tripod. Take the 10 pictures, then upload to Helicon or another program to stack.  My thread above has a link to a free online stacker that works well. After the first time it is easy.

It is set to take 3 photos. How do I change it to 10?

Nevermind. I guess you now scroll on a camera screen... 

And I ordered a tripod 

[Chris333]

Tripod showed up.

10 pics stacked:


And just a regular pic with the stock camera:


Seems like it would work better the further back you are.

[peteski]

Chris, you see the difference in the sharp focused bushes close to the camera, and in the sharpness of the backdrop trees. The regular photo shows them blurry.

But many smart phone cameras already have a camera with a lens which can produce pretty wide depth of field.  In your example the scene doesn't appear to be very deep. If you look at Bob Gilmore's photos, those show much deeper scenes where stacking makes bigger difference.

[Lemosteam]

The reality of focus stacking that has me in a conundrum is that our eyes cannot accomplish the same effect, so the desire to have a single image in total focus to me is unrealistic.  Our eyes can only focus on the object they are focused on. 

Put a different way, why are we trying to make images different than what we see with our natural eyes?

I realize that images for magazines and forum are pleasing that way i.e. flat and every pixel in focus, but usually the focus is on what someone is trying to present.

If you are trainspotting in the wild, you will never see an image such as one of Bob's magnificent depth naturally. Your eyes would see the locomotive and first few cars in focus, and everything else in front of an behind that would be blurred.

If you were next to a locomotive and looking front to back like Pete's GG1, you eyes could only focus on one spot at a time.  The entire locomotive can never be in total huma focus.

Just my thoughts on yet another hobby within the hobby, and I am not criticizing anyone that does this, I'm just musing.

[chessie system fan]

I agree that perfectly focused images don't match what our eyes see.  But they are a closer match to what our railfanning cameras can do.  Perhaps that is a better comparison.

But it is an adjustment.  I recall seeing images of real scenes edited to have a narrow focus so that they look like model scenes. It works because that's what our mind's eye thinks photographs of models should be.

[robert3985]

The reality of focus stacking that has me in a conundrum is that our eyes cannot accomplish the same effect, so the desire to have a single image in total focus to me is unrealistic.  Our eyes can only focus on the object they are focused on. 

Put a different way, why are we trying to make images different than what we see with our natural eyes?

I realize that images for magazines and forum are pleasing that way i.e. flat and every pixel in focus, but usually the focus is on what someone is trying to present.

If you are trainspotting in the wild, you will never see an image such as one of Bob's magnificent depth naturally. Your eyes would see the locomotive and first few cars in focus, and everything else in front of an behind that would be blurred.

If you were next to a locomotive and looking front to back like Pete's GG1, you eyes could only focus on one spot at a time.  The entire locomotive can never be in total huma focus.

Just my thoughts on yet another hobby within the hobby, and I am not criticizing anyone that does this, I'm just musing.

@Lemosteam - That's an interesting point of view (no pun intended!),  however we "naturally" don't only look at one spot when looking at just about anything.  I don't look at only one spot on my photos when I view them either, and when part of that photo is out of focus, it is unnatural for my eyes, which automatically focus on whatever I'm looking at, to not be able to perceive areas of my photos as being "in-focus" because the subject itself is blurry.  This means that although my eyes DO focus on the blurry areas, in real life in the 3D world, those blurry areas would come into sharp focus quickly and naturally, unlike out-of-focus areas (blurry) in a photo staying permanently out-of-focus. 

Although you're correct that our eyes don't have an infinite depth of focus (DOF), they DO however have the ability to bring into focus various things that are at different distances from the eye's lens simply by looking at whatever those things are...without our conscious brain having to think about it.

Also, for myself, when I take photos, I'm not attempting to replicate what my eyes see when out chasing trains, but what my cameras capture, and what they capture (since the subject is, a lot of the time, far away) are photos that are fully in focus.  If I'm taking shots of equipment and I'm "close" to it, such as the smokebox door of a steam locomotive, then most likely things, progressively in the distance, are going to get blurry, especially if I'm pretty close and I'm using a normal or telephoto lens.  I can cure most of the out-of-focus areas (increasing DOF) drastically by using wide angle lenses and stopping my f-stop down.

So, using HF, If I want the background to be out of focus, I can get that effect easily by just not including photos focused further away in the finished stack...which I illustrated with the photo of my Overland Centennial in my previous post.  This is much like portrait photos, which generally are accepted to be "better" if the backgrounds are quite blurry, which using a telephoto lens greatly enhances...good portrait lenses having wonderful "bokeh" (the blur pattern of the out of focus background).

However, for my general model railroad photography, photos viewed that are sharply in focus overall, appear to my brain to look more realistic than ones with a shallow DOF, because my eyes are able to look at portions of said photo (which are in-focus) and feel like they're doing the same thing they would be doing looking at the real deal...changing the view and focusing on the subject every time...which they can't perceive if portions of my photo are out of focus.

BUT, photography is art, and how a photographer presents his/her photos is their choice and their artistic expression.  So, in-focus overall, or selectively focused...which method do you like better?  It's a matter of taste as well as what the photographer is attempting to communicate...neither is "right" or "wrong", but definitely different, and I'm very happy that focus-stacking gives us a choice of the two opposites, and/or somewhere in-between.

That's my two-bits worth!

Cheerio!
Bob Gilmore

[peteski]

Besides the fact that our eyes seem to have better depth of field than a typical camera, being dynamic (live) view, we don't really notice that something our field of vision is out of focus, with macro-photography (as in N scale), the camera's depth of field is rather shallow.

Lemosteam,  when looking at the world around you, when you focus on a distant object, do you really see some object very close to you as being very blurry? Or focusing on something as close to your eye as you can still focus on, do you actually see very distant objects are severely blurry?  I bet you don't. Or not as blurry as a photo taken with a camera would be (when they were focused on either infinity or very close to the lens). 

To be honest, I believe our brain actually does something similar to real-time focus stacking, without us even realizing it.   As we experience the world around us, our brain focuses on whatever is needed at the moment, and the brain just ignores everything else (regardless if it's in, or slightly out of focus).

If you stood by the nose of a 1:1 GG1 and looked at it from the angle my photo was taken, your eyes would see the entire loco in focus.  Partially because because in the 1:1 world our eye's depth of field is much wider (and same goes for cameras equipped with the appropriate lens and f-stop selection), and partially due to the fact that our brain does some of that dynamic real-time focus adjustment. You don't  even realize it.

[Scottl]

I agree.  And when we have an image with a single, fixed focal range, it appears jarring because it prohibits our eyes from dynamically altering focal range.

[Chris333]

There was a photo in the latest GMR thta looked odd because the far backdrop was in focus, but the foreground was blurry.

[wcfn100]

10 pics stacked:

10 is probably too many.  It takes some practice with a particular camera (and scene) to figure out the right focal points.  Shouldn't be anything to do with how close you are since this is used for microscopic photography.

Jason

[Lemosteam]

@Lemosteam

1:"however we "naturally" don't only look at one spot when looking at just about anything...." 

2: "in real life in the 3D world, those blurry areas would come into sharp focus quickly and naturally, unlike out-of-focus areas (blurry) in a photo staying permanently out-of-focus." 

3: Although you're correct that our eyes don't have an infinite depth of focus (DOF), they DO however have the ability to bring into focus various things that are at different distances from the eye's lens simply by looking at whatever those things are...without our conscious brain having to think about it.

LOL. Don't get me wrong, for mags and forums stacking is great, and very pleasing, but that is what becomes unnatural to me, because if I were looking at that in real life, I know it would look completely different than that because:

Statement 1 contradicts 3 completely, because wherever your eyes focus, the surrounding becomes peripheral around your focus, until you move your eyes to a new focal point then the last focal point is now peripheral to the new focus. I.e. one's eyesight normally cannot have two focal points simultaneously, BECAUSE we can only focus on one spot at a time, whether macro, or infinity.