Sony 12-24mm f/4 G @ 12mm: Single Frame Performance at f/11 vs Focus Stacking at f/11 (Pine at Morgan Lake)
Related: digital sensor, Eastern Sierra, focus skew, focus stacking, lens mount, lens mount / sensor parallelism, lens skew, Morgan LakesMorganLakesCA, peak bagging, quality control, Sony, Sony FE, Sony FE 12-24mm f/4 G, Sony Lenses, Zerene Stacker
See my Sony mirrorless wish list.
Focus stacking using Zerene Stacker. See my tutorial/how-to in Making Sharp Images.
This 2-frame focus stack at 12mm at f/11 compares what is possible with a single frame to a focus stack. The difference in total sharpness is remarkable, especially since f/11 at 12mm might be expected to have adequate depth of field. But no single frame is up to the job for an image like this, particularly with Sony lens skew issues.
Sony 12-24mm f/4 G: Imaging Performance @ 12mm, Single Frame vs Stacked: Pine at Morgan Lake
Includes images up to full resolution. Also includes crops showing the stacked result versus , close/far frames.
The asymmetry (lens skew) of the Sony 12-24mm f/4 G is laid bare in this example—quite bad and yet not at all out of place in the Sony lens lineup. The good news is that focus stacking overcomes lens skew.
See also Single Frame Performance at f/11 vs Focus Stacking at f/11 (Downed Tree, Last Kiss of Sunlight).
Focus stacking is a tool that should be mastered by any serious landscape photographer for any scene like this one, since depth of field can never be adequate for this extreme near-far composition. Focus stacking overcomes:
- Depth of field limitations.
- Field curvature.
- Lens asymmetry (focus not symmetric across the field).
Sony A7R II + Sony FE 12-24mm f/4 G @ 12mm
[low-res image for bot]
