Quick tips on Nikon D850 focus shift (Stacking)

First, it as a very useful feature, not only for macro work.

But it only works with AF-s lenses. Which means no old AF lenses like the Micro Nikkor 200 mm f4 AF or third party lenses like the Tokina 100 mm f2,8 Makro will work with this feature (it is greyed out in the menu). That is sad as both are optical very fine lenses on the D850.

Nikon claims that the old AF system is not accurate enough, but with the qdslrdashboard app or helicon remote you could use these old lenses and achieve good results. For practical reasons these apps are used best with Wifi.

As others have already stated the menu of focus shift shooting is not very user friendly. But with a few tips it is quite easy to setup.

First thing is you set the lens to the nearest point you want to be sharp. Then you go to the camera menu scroll to the end of the list to “focus shift shooting”. There you have six submenus:

No. of shots:

You can set a high number like 50 or even 100, because the camera will stop automatically at the end of the lens range. So some stacks will only produce five shots, macro shots can consist of 50 shots or more though. With modern AF-s lenses the end of the lens range is beyond infinity. Mathematicians and Astronomers will get some hiccups with the concept “beyond infinity” but lenses need to have some tolerance at this point to focus properly at different climates and on different camera bodies. This means you will get some unsharp shots at the end of the stack, especially at landscape shots.

Focus step width:

1 means very fine increments, but 5 is normally a good compromise working for most situations.

Interval till next shot:

0 sec, I do not see any reason for any delay here, shutter shock is no issue because of silent shooting.

Exposure smoothing:

I work in manual mode and Auto Iso is off, then exposure smoothing is not necessary, therefore set to “off”.

Silent photography:

On, very useful, because no shutter shock and as the name suggests really silent.

Starting storage folder:

You can have for every new stack a new folder, but there is one bug which I find not so good. After the last stack the normal pictures are written in the folder of the last stack. So I use just one folder for all of my Raw files, download them to the computer via Lightroom and separate them afterwards with the command “Stack”.

As mentioned before I am not so happy that my two AF macro lenses do not work with this feature, and as my 45 mm and 85 mm Shift-Tilt lenses are manual focus there is no use for them either.

But depending on your subject there might be simple solutions working very well. I used my simple 50 mm Af-s f1,8 lens with extension tubes (you need a version with electric contacts, not the cheap manual ones) and I got great results with stacked flower shots. Certainly the nearer you go to 1:1 or beyond that a good macro lens might get you sharper results. I used also a Marumi diopter lens on my Nikon 85 mm AF-s f1,8 with similar very good results. There is one difference that might be important. While a macro lens can focus from 1:1 to infinity, a lens paired with extension tubes can not do this. So depending on the range of sharpness you want to achieve, the cheap solution might work or not. But extension tubes are very lightweight, so from now on I carry them with me again.

50 mm AF-s f1,8 and 12mm extension tube, f8, tripod, Led and natural light, stack of 24 shots rendered with Helicon focus method "C"

Software:

Photoshop has a stacking feature I have used a few times. But as you cannot control the parameters, the output is from excellent to almost useless. And it is slow. I tried Zerene Stacker but I did not like the interface so much (personal thing). I now use Helicon Focus. There are three methods to stack your files (A, B, and Pyramid) and you have to play around to see what method is best for the different stacks (landscape, macro,...). I found the help menu quite useful for getting a starting point. The software got recently an update and is also available in different languages. End 2017 there is a discount available directly on the Helicon focus website. I choose the unlimited lite license. This was a mistake, as the very good retouch function is not included in the lite version (you should always read the small print). The other pro features, like Helicon Remote or 3D output are not so important in my opinion.

As I own three shift/tilt lenses (24, 45, 85 mm) and have used view cameras in the past I can tell you that I was often not very happy with the outcome of landscape pictures where I wanted to get both foreground and background sharp. With all three lenses you have to stop down the lens beyond f16 to achieve this “unlimited” depth of field effect you can see on great pictures of the masters (who were using view cameras and it has a reason why one group called themselves “f64”). And it is still a try and error thing with the small viewfinder of digital Dslr´s (yes also a D800/D810/D850 viewfinder is not good enough). But the higher resolution screen of the D850 does make live view with this lenses much more usable if you use a loupe.

The focus shift feature allows unlimited depth of field with any AF-s lens, from super wide angle to telephoto. And after setup it is very fast to use. With every technical solution that brings new benefits there are also some drawbacks. Apart from controlled studio work, out in the field wind can ruin a stacked shot, or at least you have a lot of extra work retouching the final image. This is also a strength of Helicon Focus as you can repair certain areas quite good with a brush tool. So you need a stable platform (a tripod), calm conditions and a motive which does not move too fast or better none at all.

50 mm AF-s f1,8 @ f9, tripod, 9 shots rendered in Helicon Focus method "C"

Here a part of the same picture rendered with Photoshop 2018CC: Specially when there is a great difference between foreground and background I got mediocre results with Photoshop.

Nikon D850 Review (sort of)

Nikon D850 and the new guitar problem

I had the chance to play with the new Nikon D850 very early (30.8.2017) and could also work with raw files thanks to Raw Therapee. To make it short, the file quality is really very good, nothing to complain about. But on the other hand also nothing to get too excited, as the files of my beaten D800 are more than good enough still for 99% of my work. Even the files of the D750 are perfect most of the time.

Warning!-this is pixel peeping at 200%
Both pictures are made with the Nikon 50 mm f1,8 lens @f8 from tripod and with mirror up. Left D850 with Iso 64 and electronic first curtain, right Nikon D800 with Iso 100. There is a small difference in resolution and dynamic range. With a zoom lens like the 24-120 it is less or not visible at all, with a "better" lens there might be a bigger difference (I do not own an Otus lens).

So why upgrade at all? I already skipped the D810, although I got occasionally mild G.A.S. symptons the last years.

It is an investment of at least 4000.-€ (incl. tax here in Europe) as you have to buy a XQD card and a card reader up front with this camera. I even tried to argue me off this purchase. I failed, because a week ago I strolled through a town here in Lower Austria. To my astonishment one of the photo shops had the D850 on display. And when I phoned them three days later the camera was still available, so I bought it. Seems like here in Austria not so many photographers want to spend 4000.-€, because the shops here don't get larger quantities than in the USA.

What tipped me over was not a technical feature, like the good viewfinder, better AF or more megapixel. It was realising that the attitude of „ I do not need this, it does not matter which camera I use, any will do“, has a psychological problem. Yes, for most of my projects 24 Mp will be more than enough and yes most of my customers wont see any difference with the pictures no matter what camera I use. If any one out there thinks he gets more revenue, more customers with a new digital camera, think twice.

But with photography it is also like with music, you do not do it just for making money, you also are linked to this art or craft, because for making money even a job as a house cleaner would be better. If I would look at what I earn per hour, I would kick myself. But photography is the only thing which keeps me going, which is kicking my butt saying „get up, get out, get some pictures“.

Buying such a camera is for me a way to take my laziness out of me. It forces me to make new projects, because buying such a camera and then just making a few snapshots – no way!

So here are some excuses I found so far to purchase it nevertheless:

The live view stream has a better resolution, it was 640 pixels and is now 1024 pixels to match the higher magnification of the rear screen, which helps if you do studio work and use camera control pro, or the rear screen and a magnification loupe. The split screen function is helpfull, but at Nikon nobody seems to use the Tilt/Shift lenses, because it is still not possible to look at the upper left and lower right corner in split screen mode at the same time.

For checking sharpness when you use the tilt of a lens like the 45mm TS the new focus peaking function helps.
One good thing though is that now the 24mm TS lens rotates in both directions. With the D800/810 it was blocked by the bigger viewfinder/flash combo.

the less protruding viewfinder allows full rotation with the 24 mm TS lens

The screen is now tiltable, ok that´s good (I like and use the tiltable screen of the D750 often), but anyone taking vertical pictures at Nikon? Fuji is that doing right with the Xt-2.

The illuminated buttons are nice to have, but only at the the left row. On the other hand even at night photography I still need a red led lamp to see my surrounding or find pieces of equipment in my bag.

The better AF and speed is also a big improvement to my D800, I am looking forward to use that on my next trip to Africa. But for the 9 frames/sec there is the need of further investment in grip, battery and charger. Maybe the D500 might be the better investment for action or sport. Yes the D850 might be the best "allround camera" which can do anything from birds in flight to landscape or architecture. But there are situations where changing lenses (often) is not such a good thing to do and also a second body on longer trips is a wise thing to pack into your camera bag. So this D850 is not the "all in one solution" you might think. Also only the best lenses shine on the D850, this is certainly also the case with long telephoto lenses. So paired with a 600 mm f4 you get a dream team up to the moment you take your gear on board of an aircraft. Can you manage the 8kg weight restrictions or do you buy a second seat?

If you want to make the best of this AF you have a steep learning curve up front. I can recomend „Secrets of the Nikon AF System“ from Steve Perry. This pdf has 467 pages! So much about digital makes photography easier.

He has also a good video about the new AF fine tune feature. Which gets things into perspective fast, because he shows that you should do 12 readings to get a good average number. And you must center in Live View the AF point, otherwise a cryptic Text shows up. It took me more than half hour to find that I accidently switched the AF point in live view a little bit. The fine tune numbers where sometimes quite consistent, with other lenses like the Tokina Makro the readings were more erratic, but at least it did not refuse to take a third party lens. Af fine tune with one click? Sadly no!

Now checking the fine tune with a real furry animal, a teddy bear. What I found I did not like, because the numbers for my 300 mm f2,8 lens were simply said garbage. With the 1,4 Tc I had -17, but testing it with different numbers the best one was 0, or af fine tune set to "off". Seems like the af fine tune feature is very prone to (user) error.

Silent shooting mode sounded great for me, but it is only available in live view mode. So that means shooting with a 3800.-€ camera similar to a smartphone (or as someone stated, you hold the camera away from you like a smelly diaper). While you can adapt the viewfinder (diopter adjustment) to your (poor) eyesight, not so for the rear screen, which means you might need your glasses on and I am still not sure if live view AF is useable in a dark church? But the screen with the better resolution is really a big step forward and the touch screen feature is great! Now all the menus are touch sensitive, which is a good thing and speeds navigating in the menu. Certainly scrolling through pictures is also much faster.

I was also very interested in the so called „Best optical Viewfinder ever“ of the D850.

It is bright and certainly better than the one in the D750, but as numbers suggest: magnification of D810 is 0,70 with eyepoint 17 mm, the D850 has increased that to 0,75 with also 17 mm eyepoint. Hey, great, an increase of 0,05! Did Nikon really want to make the best optical viewfinder or did they reduce cost by skipping the flash? I used the on board flash quite often for remote control of macro flash. With the D850 I will need a commander module or dedicated flashes=extra weight to carry.

I am beyond 50 and get more and more problems with my eyesight, certainly a big bright viewfinder helps. But also the size of the letters in the viewfinder and the menu is interesting. Here nothing has changed, but it was quite useable before.

Automated stacked shots for macro looks good on paper, but with the app „helicon remote“ or even more versatile „qdslr-dashboard“ this was possible with every Nikon Camera which had open Wifi. See the problem, the snap bridge bluetooth/Wifi of the new Nikons is not allowing 3^rd party apps to function like before, its a more closed system with very poor functionality.

Also to my big disappointment this feature does not work with the Nikon 200 mm f4 Macro lens or my Tokina 100 mm f2,8 Macro, only AF-S or AF-P lenses are supported. When I tried it manually I encountered a problem with snap bridge (surprise?), in Live view there is no focus peaking on the smartphone, live view on camera and releasing the shutter on the snap bridge app does also not work. So back to the good old cable release! Silent shutter does work, but without flash, it wont fire. 
I tried a stacked shot with 30 frames. I use a mac book pro retina with 16 GB Ram and 2,8 Ghz quad processor. Such a task takes this computer to his limits, but he managed to do it. So I do not think that this camera will force me to buy a new computer, but it slows some tasks down like panoramas or stacked shots.

64 ISO, F8, 1/40 sec

A stack of 30 frames, manual mode with a Oben macro slider and the 100 mm f2,8 macro from Tokina. Silent shutter "1" shutter release via snap bridge app. Working very accurate would be good, as the processing on the computer took about 30 minutes. Every mistake means back to the start. Here I missed the opportunity to use the 4:5 Raw file option, which would have reduced file size. No need to record more of the black area.

Update 9.10.2017:

The time lapse features I have checked at the weekend. It works good and the combination of silent shutter is a good thing. But because of the massive file sizes I will still use my D750 or even my Coolpix A for occasional time lapse recording. And it also makes me nervous to put a 5000.-€ Camera/lens combo alone out in the field. But the same here like with stacked shots. Good if you are satisfied with the onboard tools, bad if you want to do your own thing, because snap bridge again limits this. The electronic shutter is certainly a good idea, because with heavy use of timelapse you can get beyond the limit of the mechanical shutter.

When I buy a new camera one of the first tasks is to test it with all my lenses. I have to do this anyway once a year to check for any problems. This time I found my 16-35 mm f4 lens to underexpose 1 stop, a cheap repair at Nikon fixed the problem. What astonished me was that wide angle lenses like the 14-24 are much better in the corners on the D850 than on my D800 (all settings equal and shooting from a tripod). I have no explanation for this, but I take it as a bonus of the new sensor right now.

this is the left side of the picture, in the center both pictures look identical sharp and focus point was also the same, checked it a second time with similar results.

Today, 19.10.2017 Lightroom is supporting the D850. Before I downloaded the files into the dng format via Adobe Bridge. The dng files are about 10 MB per file smaller than the original losless compressed nef 14 bit and I can not see a difference in file quality so far. But it was a workaround and in the long run I prefer the original Nef files over the Adobe dng format. For comparing other Raw converters the Nef file is preferred. A side note: I tested Capture One and the files do have more "punch",  but not because of some secret sauce. there are different profiles used, in C1 something more like a landscape profile, at Adobe the standard Profile is more flat. If you use the landscape profile in LR you get quite similar results to C1. And as a DAM Lightroom is still way better than C1. Changing software is like changing camera brands: Think twice about it. But testing C1 was actually a good idea, the different look brought new ideas which I now use with pictures in LR. 

20 mm f1,8 @ f16, pulled out of a single shot, so no HDR

And now to the „new guitar problem“:

Take a side step and imagine you are a musician, a guitar player. You have a decent model of an electric guitar. Now you have an offer for a guitar used and played by Eric Clapton, or a new model with fantastic new whatever advertised. Guess what, is there a guitar player out there who thinks he will be a better player just with a new guitar? Yes, there will be a lot of them, although they know that practising is way more important. Some even stated that talent is overrated, because someone who is practising like hell will beat the talented any time.


Disclaimer: I am not payed by anyone, so I can write freely what I like and what I do not like. And this is not a bashing of the D850, Nikon, or anyone out there. There are simply always things to find which work not as good as advertised. But after using the camera now for three weeks I can say it is the best camera I have ever owned
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lots of light and conversion to black and white, no problem here for the D850. To be honest, the D750 would make a similar good picture. And who needs 45 MP for Facebook?

Tested the D850 at a local concert of the band "Monti Beton". This picture is made with 11400 ISO and turned out quite useable. The problem is that the modern LED lights on stage can have a "problematic" spectrum which leads to color artifacts. 

Yongnuo YN-685-Nikon: You get what you pay for

Up front, I like the simple manual Yongnuo flashes because of their reliable radio trigger, that gives me a lot of freedom and a simple solution to light up areas. My Elinchrom flashes are much more powerful, but also a lot heavier and need a power supply, so a lot of work to do. Often 4-6 Yongnuo flashes will be enough like the example below of a wooden ceiling in a church shows.

In such a setup I did not use my Nikon Sb-900 very often because I can not control their output like the Yongnuo flashes. The CLS System from Nikon is not alternative to me as it is ir-flash based and very unreliable, only working well in short distances, like with the macro flash Sr-200.

So I sold my two SB-900 and bought two YN-685 instead. These flashes are TTL- flashes and have also a radio receiver built in. Sadly after a few uses I got into problems. First the flashes seem to have a connection problem, often they do not get the information from the camera properly via the hot shoe. So they will fire, but with wrong output and the zoom reflector does not correspond to the lens. 
As a radio slave they work without problems and also as manual flash. But for that purpose I have the cheaper YN-560-III

So if you want TTL flash for Nikon look somewhere else. Metz flashes might be a good alternative or the Nikon SB-700 is not too expensive. 
See also the picture below about the poor quality of the battery compartment of the YN-685, which wont close properly after a few uses.

There is a newer firmware out there, but updating is avery complex procedure and you need a YN622C-TX trigger to do this. 

Why the M/A to M switch on Nikon lenses sucks

Actually it not only sucks, it can be a cause of disaster.

For those many Nikon shooters who use BBAF (Back Button Autofocus) this switch on most of the Nikon lenses is meaningless. For others it might be usefull, as on the smaller Nikon Bodys you have to disable AF in the Menu, not having an AF Switch on the Camera (like D750). But wait, even then you can make a manuall override. Half press the shutter, focus manually (override the AF) and you are done. But for the next picture you have to do this again. 

Every button or switch can be useful or can work against you, it depends. What happened to me was that my 35 mm f1,8 AF-s lens was set accidently to M on this switch. Taking pictures in a quite dark church of people celebrating with f2,2 at 1/80 sec and 3200 ISO does not leave much room for "better" f stops. I was concentrating on the people, the lens was in M mode and at about infinity distance, the people were at 4-5 m distance. That meant that I was not able to see in the viewfinder that the lens was set to the wrong distance (this shocked me more afterwards than the fact that I made a technical mistake). 

Certainly the Af confirmation beep was set to "off" in the church. Yes the AF circle/triangle in the Viewfinder should be a warning, but it is tiny, very easy to forget about it in the heat of the action.
So my solution is: Tape this damned switch and forget it.
And if you have not tried BBAF - do it, it is very usefull.