Technique Update
I find it funny that I can entertain myself, year after year, trying to find a happy medium between stacking and single-shot photography, between shallow depth-of-field and lots of depth-of-field laced with diffraction, between a couple stacked layers and many, between FF cameras and medium-format, between the devil and the deep-blue sea.
And I have traced this rabbit through well over 100 hundred lenses, ending up with the most refined, sharp, fast, and highly-corrected lenses that I can afford and some I probably can’t afford. Am I better off than when I began? That’s hard to say; I am wiser, but have I solved the riddle? My guess would be no. So where do I stand in the spring of 2017?
There is no doubt that the traditional single-shot photo has less artifacts. Period. End of story. Yet if I have to push the aperture fairly high to get enough depth-of-field and before I am happy, diffraction rears its ugly head. And with high apertures, we lose any lovely bokeh that might be available, and that is not particularly attractive.
So, what can work and does fairly often is to make what I call a short stack, a stacked photo with 3-5 layers, with each layer zeroed in on a particular part of the photo I want to be sharp in the ultimate photos. Even these take some touching up, but usually not much retouching.
If I want to make a long stack, the lens had better be very sharp and very well corrected. I have to fine-step it or even put it on a focus rail. And many good lenses have too short a focus throw for stacking. They have to go on a rail. The Coastal Optics 60mm APO was one of those.
For example, The Nikon Noct Nikkor is useful for one-shot photos and if done carefully for what I call a short-stack, meaning, as mentioned, a few shot layers, each one of which is focused on a primary part of the subject. However, I find that doing a long stack with the Noct Nikkor is useless because a coherent image without a lot of “unfixable” artifacts does not seem to result. In other words, take a one-off photo or a short stack with the Noct. It is possible to mount the Noct Nikkor on a focus rail and micro-step it to produce a better result, but it is clear to me that this kind of process is not natural to the Noct. It is a remarkable lens, but not very useful for stacking.
For a long stack, a lens like the El Nikkor 105mm APO (note the APO, because the non-APO 105mm is not exceptional IMO) does very well, but we are probably stacking upward of 30 layers or so. And with large stacks, artifact retouching has to be included in the equation. And since I almost always push the envelope, I have a great number of failures.
Another consideration is that most of the really great well-corrected lenses are not close-up or macro lenses, and this has led me to see if any extension can work on those lenses (to get me closer) and I find that even the smallest extension (K1 Ring 5.8 mm) messes with the lens IQ.; No doubt about it. Sometimes I hazard it anyway, but if I am being honest with myself there is always a tradeoff and I know it. It shows.
So, the bottom line is that each lens is perfect just as it is and my monkeying with it never can improve it. It is easier (and wiser) to adapt my photography to the lens than vice-versa, which I am learning to do.
These days I divide my time between lenses mounted directly on the D810 (like the Otus series) and various more exotic lenses mounted on the Cambo Actus technical camera. I am settling down into this pattern, so it seems. I tried to get into the new mirrorless medium-format world, but the Fuji lenses were not good enough and, for some reason, the IQ was not useful with lens adapters and non-Fuji lenses. I don’t need that. I like the Hasselblad X1D, but for me it would just be a walk-around camera and I don’t just walk around that much. I tend to go to an area and spend time. And I don’t do snapshots.
So, that’s roughly where I am.
