by macona » Wed Mar 06, 2013 8:28 pm
I have the Magic Lantern software installed on my camera, I have not tried the focus stacking. Might work pretty well with the 50mm 1.4 and a bunch of diopters to let me get close that way. Cant do anything like that with the nikon lens since there is no way to drive the focus from the body. Could do it externally with a stepper driving the focus, in fact I have a motor, bracket, pulley and belt just for that. This lens was taken out of a piece of equipment that checked LCDs for bad pixels.
Canon seems the most friendly to "hacking" and allowing computer control. When I worked at Laika and before we started filming ParaNorman they tried every brand of dSLR. We needed to be able to control the camera from software. Nikon wanted nothing to do with us since we were "only" buying about 50 cameras. Canon, on the other hand, was very helpful, gave us the SDK to interface, lent cameras and lenses to play with and stuff like that. I think they ended up buying about 60 5D Mark II's and they are buying 5D Mark IIIs for the next film.