Here's my first effort at focus stacking with a conventional macro rail. The subject is an old Elgin wristwatch that I sold on eBay. I thought it important to show the internals on such an old collectible, thus the effort.

Please comment if you like this photo, or if you have any questions.

The image was made by placing the watch on a simple wooden stand inside my photo tent. I have some Protostar flocked light trap material on the wooden stand, to greatly reduce reflections and provide a nearly black background.

My Nikon D600 camera was on a tripod by the front of the photo tent, with an inexpensive macro rail between the tripod and camera. The front flap on the tent was down, draped over the camera, to fill in the on-axis nooks and crannies.

Lighting was from two off-camera Nikon flashes, one on each side of the tent, triggered by radio remote and optical slave. The tent softens the light from the flashes, giving it more of a wrap-around effect, and reducing hard reflections from highlights on the subject. Flash power (1/8, I think) and camera exposure were manual. Aperture was f/8 for best resolution. Camera ISO was at its base of 100 for maximum image quality.

Once set up and framed, I used the macro rail to step the relative position of the camera and subject, triggering the shutter remotely at each step. This means the plane of perfect focus moved through the shallow subject in 23 steps, each spaced by moving the macro rail knob “a smidgen”.

I used Zerene Stacker (trial version) to combine the 23 images into one sharp, full resolution photo, which was further tweaked with Nikon ViewNX 2.