DOFIS: Infinity Bracketing

Just a quick post to say I've tweaked the DOFIS UI to better represent the 'sky bracketing' feature; which is now called Infinity Bracketing; and the DOFIS menu item has been changed to reflect this.

As always, the latest version of DOFIS can be downloaded from the righthand link.

Infinity exposure bracketing will mainly be useful to landscape photographers that wish to also auto focus bracket, assuming you are using a lens that DOFIS can drive, and ensure the land and the sky exposures are adequately captured for post processing.

Infinity bracketing is based on the assumption that the bright areas of the scene are at/beyond the hyperfocal, and thus don't need focus bracketing. Thus infinity bracketing may also be of use to those shooting a focus stack from inside a building, looking out through a window, where outside is bright and beyond the hyperfocal.

As before, the workflow is to ETTR for the scene, ie the sky or outside, set the infinity bracket uplift, ie to be used for the land or interior, between 2-6Ev, set focus on the nearest object of interest or the focus minimum, and press your camera's trigger key, ie the RATE key on my 5D3.

Although you can evaluate the scene with an exposure meter, if in doubt I suggest using a 4Ev value for the infinity bracketing, ie a so-called ‘zero noise’ exposure, to lift the deep shadows that will result from the ETTRing.

You can also use Dual-ISO, but note this will be added to all images in the sequence.

If you have requested bookends, and a delay, DOFIS will start the bracketing sequence after the delay and take a dark frame bookend first (and last).

DOFIS will then reset the ETTR exposure to the uplifted value you have requested, thus, hopefully, ensuring your land/interior has the 'best' exposure. This uplifted exposure will then be used to capture perfect focus brackets, at your requested overlap, as set in the ML DoF menu, all the way out to an infinity shot at four times the hyperfocal.

Once the focus brackets have been captured DOFIS will reset the exposure to the ETTR value and take an infinity exposure shot, thus ensuring your highlights are captured.

As usual I welcome any feedback on DOFIS, especially other users’ experiences with using DOFIS and/or ideas to make it 'better'.