First shot with a DIY motorized macro rail

I've just made my own motorized macro rail using some parts from ebay (probably ~40$ altogether), and here is the first test. The idea was to have an electric gear motor to move photo camera with a macro lens (in this case - macro bellow with a reversely mounted 50mm f2.0 manual lens) super slowly - something like 10mm per minute. Then you let the camera shoot (using intervalometer from the Magic Lantern firmware) fast - three frames per second on my Canon 50D. I use an external flashlight which is capable of making 3 flashes per second at 1/32 of the full power. I use very fast CF card in my camera, to make sure I maintain 3fps for more than a hundred shots.

 

In this test shot, I had ~120 shots made over 40 seconds covering ~5mm in depth. I merged all the shots using free focus stacking software Enfuse.

 

The purpose of all this trouble is to create a much larger depth of field than in a single shot, so you can have your whole macro object in focus, not just a thin slice. With a motorized macro rail one can in principle get to almost any depth of field (up to a few cm). Of course that will take hundreds of shots.

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Uploaded on December 15, 2014
Taken on December 15, 2014