Lenses for Focus Stacking

Published: 17th Jan 2009
Updated: 1st Dec 2009

Lenses for this kind of work fit into a number of categories...

1. Normal Lenses
2. Macro Lenses
3. Microscope Objectives
4. Darkroom Enlarger Lenses
5. Stacked lenses (Reversing a normal lens on the end of a telephoto lens)

Normal Lenses

These can be great cheap lenses to start you off if you have a bellows. I started doing this with an ancient manual focus Olympus OM 50mm/f1.8 standard lens, purchased from eBay for an obscenely low price. I still use this lens reversed for low magnification bellows work.

If your system is non Olympus, you should be able to find an equivalent lens for your system of choice. Just make sure it will fit onto the front of your bellows, preferably reversed. You may need a reversing adapter to achieve this, as usual take a look on eBay for these... It should be a pre-digital manual focus lens.

The Olympus OM bellows has the neat feature that you can reverse a lens without a reversing adapter by simply reversing the lens mount on the bellows focus rail.

Note this kind of lens generally works best when stopped down by a couple of f-stops. I never use the 50/1.8 at a larger aperture than f4, and more usually I use f5.6.

Macro Lenses

The next step up, in terms of quality, true macro lenses should work well on the front of a bellows without reversing.

There is a large range of lenses in available this category, from relatively low power 100mm macro lens to the high powered bellows only macro lenses like the OM 38/2.8 and OM 20/2.0.

Some of these lenses can be very expensive, and will only work at their best for a small range of magnification.

Most decent macro lenses will work well wide open, or in some cases 1/2 or 1 stop down from there. Using them wide open will obviously result in thinner 'slices' and more shots to get the same range of focus, but you should end up with a final image containing more detail.

Microscope Objectives

For high magnification stacked work, the macro lenses mentioned above struggle to keep up with some of the best microscope objectives as this forum post shows.

The most commonly used (and probably the best available for this kind of work) are the Nikon CF PLAN objectives, non infinity corrected, RMS mount. The Nikon M PLAN CF 10x objective is a great place to start. That is the lens used for most of my high-magnification (7-15x) stack work at the moment.

These objectives generally do not have aperture control, and are quite fast. This together with the high magnification factors leads to very thin DOF

Darkroom Enlarger lenses

I confess I don't know much about these, just that many use them as low-magnification lenses for this kind of work. The 50/2.8 EL-Nikkor seems to be well liked...

There are several discussions about these sorts of lenses over at the PhotoMacrography forum

Stacked Lenses

I don't know much about this either, but the principle is bung a reversed 50mm standard lens on the front of a 200mm telephoto lens and you should get a roughly 4:1 macro combination. Whether it will work well or not depends on the lenses and there are too many combinations for much to be known on this subject. If you have some suitable sounding lenses then it should be worth splashing out a few pounds on a reversing adapter and some step rings if required.

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• Introduction
• What is Focus Stacking?
• Focus Stacking Equipment
• Focus Stacking Rig
• Lenses for Focus Stacking
• Common problems
• Advanced Focus Stacking Tricks
• Focus Stacking Software
• Focus Stack processing example
• Other Focus Stacking Resources

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