Equipment

What equipment do you need to do focus stacking?

The answer to that really depends on what you already have, how much you want to spend, how much time you want to spend on eBay, and how serious you are about micro-photography.

To shoot high magnification studio stacks (say 4x and beyond) reliably, you will need the following equipment at absolute minimum.

1. A Digital SLR
2. Ideally a wired or wireless remote shutter release for the camera
3. A Manual-focus, manual-aperture lens
4. Extension tubes or bellows
5. *Focusing rail (or bellows with built in focusing rail)
6. Solid mount for camera/bellows/lens assembly (A good tripod, copy stand etc)
7. If necessary an adapter from the camera mount to the bellows
8. If necessary an adapter from the bellows to the lens
9. Some light: a bright window, a desk lamp or a flashgun with off camera cable
10. To process the stacks you will need a computer and some stacking software.

* A regular focusing rail such as the one built into the OM bellows will get you stacking up to around 4:1, beyond this you will not be able to reliably move the unit in small enough step sizes and you will get out of focus bands in your output. To go beyond this magnification you will need a very fine movement such as a microscope focus block or a linear stage. A future article will go into this in more detail.


To go into some more details on these elements, (1) the DSLR does not need to be anything fancy, I'm still shooting with a pair of Olympus E330s from 2007. (2) Suitable lenses will be the subject of an entire future article (or two) but a great place to start is an old manual-focus, manual-aperture 'standard' 50mm lens which will mount on your bellows/extension tubes (if necessary with the aid of an adapter). Ideally the aperture of the lens should open and close as you move the aperture ring while the lens is not mounted to a camera.


(2,3,4&7) To be honest if you have a DSLR and a decent tripod, and you can find a suitable camera adapter, a great start would be an Olympus OM Auto bellows and an Olympus OM 50/1.8 MF lens. Using this particular lens on the OM Bellows gives you aperture control (aperture open/set value) with a switch on the bellows, which is very convenient. You can also reverse the whole front of the bellows with the lens mounted to reverse the lens. The Olympus OM bellows also has a built in focusing rail that you can use for lower magnification work.

Please read my next blog post which will explain how to put this equipment together to shoot a low magnification focus stack.


Although you can happily start out with a tripod (as I did), if you get serious about stacking you will want to build a more permanent and stable rig. At this point a couple of questions arise.

1. Vertical or Horizontal movement?
2. Subject or Camera movement?

Personally I almost exclusively move the subject rather than move the camera. This is just because the subject is a tiny insect weighing a fraction of a gram. The camera is a camera, bellows, lens, flash power unit and some cables and weighs probably a kilogram. It just seems obvious to me that moving the subject is easier.

Horizontal vs Vertical is not such an easy decision. I mostly shoot vertical but I do have a horizontal rig available as well, although I do have to move my lighting equipment from one rig to the other.

So a couple of future articles will go into building a horizontal and a vertical rig, both featuring subject movement. (Although the horizontal rig would be quite easy to convert to camera movement).