My impression of it as image is that it is either too much or not enough :) If you isolated a single leg that would good, if you showed the body including perhaps the head and eye then that is good. As it stands I find it somewhat cluttered as an image - but that is my taste :) Is that the sort of f...

... Best info I have is that it's a matter of convenience for changing lenses and magnifications without having to move the base of the rail. --Rik Pretty much what I said :) The nice thing about writing your own control software is that you can have things like a button called "RETRACT TO PARK", d...

Look at it from a different angle - why did they start selling an extended rail ? Hmmm, maybe because a lot of customers felt limited by the standard length ? Most of the rails I use only have a movement of about 50mm - much more than I need for a typical stack but I often find myself hankering for ...

Craig Gerard wrote:Would it be of benefit to extend the title of this thread so as to encompass the expanded discussion?
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... or even just run a spell check on the current one !

I think you might be going a bit overboard on your isolators / relays etc. You can pretty much isolate and control everything from a uP just using a optoisolator - they are very fast and decouple everything. Just stick a suitable resistor on the outlet pin from your uP and connect that to the opto d...

ChrisR wrote:...The answer must be out there somewhere.

Yes, it's called a flashgun with a 1/10,000" exposure !!!

This might be obvious but if you start testing with flash remember to either turn off your led lights or makes sure that your unflashed exposure setting is dark enough to eliminate the ambient light from the leds. I find the simplest light setup which easily allows me to combine flash and continuous...

Well the arms arrived today. I'd say they are definitely up to the job of holding a flash unit like the 580. The clamps, however, are not suitable for attaching to a flat surface (table edge for example). I think I will need a Manfrotto clamp with the wedge... The Manfrotto superclamps go up to abo...

Like Chris said, stepping motors plus encoders are simply because the stepper hopes you move whereas the encoder tells you you moved. It's not really that big a problem in our use but in industrial systems which try and perform fast accurate movements time and time again it is important. And yes - w...

Andrew, I probably didn't communicate my point clearly. By turning off standby, you can take as much time as you want arranging your shot, and the flashes won't turn to standby mode. No need to start with a throwaway shot. One frame every five seconds, huh? I usually go about 16 seconds between fra...

As Chris mentioned, it would be really helpful to know more about your intended subject matter. Of your existing equipment it would appear that the only one with an "external" f-stop ring is the 50/1.8. For about $15, you could get a set of the cheap Chinese extension tubes (Nikon mount) and a Niko...

Chris S. wrote:...
Chris and Andrew, can't you simply shut off the standby mode on your speedlights? That's what I do with my Nikon units....
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I stack at about 1 frame every 5secs or less, my flashes stay hot and hopefully not smoking !

ChrisR wrote:.. but not with a Canon in "silent" EFSC shake-free mode, which gives no output for flash.

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well you can guess the answer to that !

Simply put it is the Magnification =(Si-f)/f where Si is sensor plane to lens plane and f is the focal length of the lens. you can put some numbers into this calculator and it will show you: http://tirpor.com/macro/macro_DOF.htm Mostly I'm just wondering if it would be in the 5x to 10x range, or wou...