The Camera Connect app sucks floppy donkey dick through a straw. I never use it anymore. My rant on the topic is probably still on the first page of this very community, in fact. There is no depth in hell deep enough to bury whoever signed off on the decision to force users to create an account and require the app to have an internet connection just to start. Beelzebub himself will have to take up his shovel and dig a new sub-basement just for that purpose.

The way that Canon cameras handle focus bracketing and focus stacking is also monumentally stupid. The only direct experience I have is with my R10, but its inbuilt stacking function is so worthless that I gave up on it entirely and I do all of my stacking outboard, in software on my PC. Even the bracketing setup is tedious and counterintuitive: It requires going into a two-layers-deep submenu (unless you pin it to your quick menu, which I’ve done) and then it requires two button inputs or two screen taps to enable and disable. For some reason the enabler isn’t a toggle, it’s the equivalent of a dropdown menu which only has two options. So… Why not just make it a toggle? (Several other options that should be toggles are like this in the menus, but focus bracketing is the one I mainly use.)

Then the only control you’ve given over focus bracketing in particular is the number of exposures and the “size” of the steps you want it to perform. Except the steps are arbitrary, and completely nondescriptive. The only hint you’re given is that the camera will take smaller steps the larger the aperture is, which makes sense, but there’s still nothing to tell you exactly how far out into real space it’s going to go and thus you have no idea in advance how deep your final depth of field is actually going to be.

This would be merely annoying if it weren’t also for the fact that if you leave the onboard focus stacking enabled as well, most of the time it flat out doesn’t work. If there is just one single exposure in the entire bunch that the camera decides it doesn’t like it throws a tantrum, it cancels the stack operation and deletes your entire batch of exposures. So you can’t even take the original images and try again yourself later on your computer or whatever, or even exclude any of the duds at the end(s) of the stack and have the camera try again. No, if the camera finds one frame it secretly determines does not have enough contrast detail to be considered “in focus” it doesn’t ignore it, it doesn’t prompt you, it simply throws the entire thing on the floor and sulks.

If you try to use the feature, it’s a guessing game as to how many exposures you need to take and how big the steps should be, with no advance indicator of the final outcome, so your results can be:

1. You undershot. Not all of your subject is in focus. While you were fucking around in the menus trying to correct this, your subject got bored and flew off.
2. Somehow, you managed to guess perfectly. Buy a lottery ticket.
3. You overshot, and caused your camera to display an error and delete your attempt. Your subject also immediately flew off afterwards.

Whoever is responsible for this: Fuck you with an egg beater. Your punishment is twenty lashes with an RS-80 cable, confiscation of your cameras and lenses, and you shall own only a Kodak Disc Camera for the rest of your life.

What they should have done is stolen the idea from e.g. OpenCamera on Android, which gives you a pair of clear and concise sliders that not only directly correlate to real world physical focal distances for your start and stop points, but the interface also tells you what those numbers are right there on the screen and previews the focus as you adjust the sliders.

This is self-explanatory. A monkey could use it successfully. But somehow Canon spent the gods alone know how much of their R&D budget to arrive at the precise mathematically determined least correct way to do it, and they’re proud of it.

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