I did raise the issue with WeMacro and was told:- ——— There are several factors that may make the chances of missing a photo higher, especially with Canon cameras......... 1,Please turn off the liveview on the camera screen while shooting.The switching back and forth of operating modes affects. 2,T...

I have seen the same sort of results using WeMacro and WeMacro software on a Canon. It was missing firing the shutter occasionally, sometimes for 3 steps at a time when using live view and quiet mode 2 (EFCS). It didn’t happen if used mechanical shutter with a long exposure and second curtain flash...

Perhaps I have misunderstood, but... My understanding is that your first and second stacked results (https://www.photomacrography.net/forum/download/file.php?id=3754 and https://www.photomacrography.net/forum/download/file.php?id=3755) used source images from the same acquisition. That is, you shot...

When you say "radical difference", what aspects are you referring to? --Rik The absence of the artifacts seen in the previous image. It's a much better stack/image, albeit with far fewer images in the stack. On the previous image, the only way I can imagine there being missing images would be if th...

Did you try the "play like a filmstrip" method for investigating the first run? Each gap in focus coverage would have appeared as a sudden jump in what was focused, as you skipped over the gap. Yes, that's what made me wonder if I was starting the sequence of exposures too soon and ending it too la...

I singled out a lone coffee ground, keeping the start and end points much more in focus:

PMax is relentless about preserving focused detail, so the intermittently-blurred appearance of that bright fiber is very odd. Could some of the artifacts be caused by including too many out of focus images? I reran the stack, excluding the most out of focus images. The right side seems sharper to ...

Scarodactyl wrote: ↑

Mon May 03, 2021 1:14 pm

Is this a stack? It looks like a layer missed focus.

PMax stack of 170 images processed with Zerene, 30micron steps.

In the below image (unused coffee grounds), I notice some haze in the upper portion. Any clues on the cause? Canon 80D Pentax(?) M42 bellows Amscope 4x finite objective 3 Flashpoint 300 studio strobes Wemacro diffusion disk as shown in the post-fire rig thread in the equipment forum PMax stack of 17...

Experimenting with strobe power and sync speeds:

micro_pix wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 24, 2021 2:45 am

Deanimator wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 23, 2021 7:16 pm

I'm lucky I missed all of that.

Good luck.

Thanks! Great to see you have your gear set up and working again after your very traumatic year!

Dave

I'm astonished at how quickly I got the diffusion working properly.

It was about three days after my walk that I noticed this tick. It’s now a week later and I had the violent shivers last night and neck and head pain this morning. The doc suspects Lyme disease so a blood test in the morning and 3 weeks antibiotics!! Dave I'm lucky I missed all of that. Good luck.

Coarse ground pepper, shot with the same setup as the others:

I'd love to have a dedicated space for something like this. We have a small house, with small garage, and a lot of stuff accumulated over the years. I suppose it's not a bad thing since I've focused on building very compact systems for that reason, but I could put all my macro stuff and more on tha...

Looks solid, on a solid floor.

My previous apartment had floors so unstable, you could see camera and subject move relative to each other if they weren't on the same platform.

I ended up building a heavy table out of structural pipe and fittings, with a steel and aluminum camera rig on top.