Reikan FoCal with Sigma Dock

[Botts]

Hello everyone,

I just ordered a Sigma 35/1.4 and USB dock.

Has anyone developed a workflow for using Reikan FoCal with the Sigma dock? It seems like they'd be a fit made in heaven for each other.

This obviously isn't as important for the prime 35mm as it would be for one of the Sigma zooms, but a workflow would be useful nonetheless.

If no one has tried this before I'll try and figure it out myself!

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

The Sigma dock adjusts the lens at multiple points, Focal adjusts the body at one or two points depending on the model. If the dock is not doing its job, I'd return it and the lens.
On second thought, if you had a second body, you could use Focal on it, that might be something interesting to check out.

 

[Botts]

I know what you're saying, but wouldn't it be neat if there was a way for focal to give the option of adjusting lens or body?

Then if you had two or three bodies you could move the lens to the average of them, and hopefully it'd be was closer to bang on on any non-AFMA bodies.

Alternately it could ask you whether you'd prefer a lens or AFMA adjustment.

It could also test before/after sigma dock adjustment better than I can by vision.

 

[AdamJ]

The dock allows you to adjust focus at four predetermined distances. Since I posted about my initial experience with the dock, I've actually made an adjustment to the furthermost focus distance on the 35mm, as I found it was slightly front-focusing at distance. The dock enabled me to change only the furthermost setting, leaving the closer settings as they are, because they were already fine.

But yes, I know what you mean. My decision was to use the dock to make relative adjustments as above, plus global adjustments to all the distance settings only if the lens was clearly out of step with the rest of my lenses. As it happens, my copy is not out of step with my other lenses. It requires no AFMA on my 5D MkII, in line with most of my other lenses. On my 7D, I settled on -3 AFMA, which didn't surprise me as more of my lenses seem to require a little correction on my 7D compared with my 5D MkII.