Focus presets ?

[Hey]

Hi everybody! So first just want to say thanks to everybody working on the project, it's really amazing to see what the community can do, Canon engineers should be ashamed...

Anyway I do a lot of astrophoto, and one thing that is quite a pain to do every night is to focus on the stars. Now I have an idea : we could save focus presets (like "18mm - Stars") and load them when we need it, that would make focusing on "still" stuff that you take regularly a lot easier.

Please forgive me if this has already been requested or implemented in nightly, I'm too scared to use them.
Thank you.

[garry23]

Hey

This has been requested before (my me) but the idea got little traction. I found another solution using a TCL script running from Smartshooter on my Venue-8 Pro Windows Tablet.

My scenario is that I wish, for a given FL (I usually use 24mm), to carry out a focus stack, ie for landscapes.

For my 5DIII I have worked out I need to take three images at 3, 5 and 15ft, at F/10.

I initially pre-calibrated the lens with a few marks (you may wish to try this).

The Smartshooter solution hints at how ML could do this, ie in a script.

In other words, assuming you have an auto-focus lens, you get Smartshoort (or an ML script) to drive the lens first to its end stop (say the macro of the infinity end), then step to the correct focus distance, ie in my case 3, 5 and 15 ft.

I know how many steps as a pre-calibrate the lens once.

As I say, once scripts are running on my 5DIII I will give this a try, until then Smartshooter is the next best thing to ML....IMHO

Cheers

Garry

[dmilligan]

and one thing that is quite a pain to do every night is to focus on the stars.

Have you tried focusing with LV and fps override? Super easy. I have an astro config preset with FPS override set to 2 fps (with a fast lens you can go higher), low light mode, and LV display gain on. Zoom 10x and make the stars as small as you can, takes about 15 seconds. Focus can vary with temperature so I prefer to focus every time I'm out, and even sometimes in the middle of my sessions if the temperature has changed a lot.

[Audionut]

A script and a module for focus infinity.

[Hey]

Have you tried focusing with LV and fps override? Super easy.

Yes, with LV and EV gain of course it works great but sometimes I'm in a situation when I can't put my eye behind my camera and/or point at a bright star. Don't know if it happens only to me.

A script and a module for focus infinity.

Thank you, it looks a bit complicated, I'll take a deeper look this week. Even if that will solve my problem, I still think having the ability to save presets would be a neat feature.

Thank you.