motorised sliders

Cognysis Stackshot. Works well, interfaces with ZereneStacker and HeliconFocus. The interface on the older style controller is incomprehensible; that's why I run it through Zerene. The new 3x controller with touch screen seems better and am thinking of getting that. Keep the old one fix on my compound scope, and the new one for regular SLR photography. Expensive, yes, but it works. Step size you still have to figure out yourself, based on magnification, f-stop and circle of confusion. Easy to do in Excel. I printed out a table and laminated that. On the compound it is strictly by NA, so have a sticker on the motor driving the fine focus.

One thing to notice is that it produces helical dirt/dead-pixel trails in larger stacks (>30 images). No problem cleaning it up, but you should be aware of it. I think it has to do with the helical screw being used to advance. When I did it manually with a cog-wheel advance focusing rail, the dirt trails were rather centrifugal-linear.

Performance: A+. Have shot up to 7:1 with MPE65 and 1.4 TC and something like 30 µm steps, shooting with flash and short time intervals, shoot with UV filter and multi second exposures, can adapt to different distance per revolution to use it on my compound scope. Shooting from 4-5 frames up to about 200. Cables hold up, except for power connector which developed a bit of a loose contact. Manageable, but annoying. I have the shorter rail, and it is sufficient for my applications.

What takes a bit of fiddling is figuring out the duration of the shoot command. It needed to be a bit longer on my 5DsR compared to my 5D2. I remember when I first got it, that took a bit of experimentation to get right.

Portability: haven't taken it out in the field, but there is an LI-battery pack option, or I could use my PCBuff Vagabond and pretend I have a regular outlet.

I've got the Kessler Second Shooter set up....motorized slider, controller and am playing with the software to control it, KOS..on a small laptop.

http://www.kesslercrane.com/second-shooter

So far, it looks to be really good stuff. I've only scratched the surface, but it looks to have some amazing potential....I'm setting it up to shoot some video I do with my 5D3.

I hope to try, in the future, to set it up to do some time-lapse, or hyper lapse, and even some astral shooting.

It is a bit pricey, I think I got it a year or so ago, on sale for right about at $2K.

I've just only recently had time to try to start to play with it in any meaningful way, but so far...WOW!!

Hope that helps a little....

cayenne