I am stereo photographer and currently working with a camera pair of two Ixus860 to take stereo images.
I am only interested in taking images no movies. The images later on I view with this kind of viewer:
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/NUadKOX.png)
Since this camera pair is getting older I wanted to replace it with StereoPI V2. I am a backer of kickstarter campaign and ordered the camera kit which comes with a small LCD screen. I want to create a mobile cam, battery based to carry with me.
For stereo images it is indispensable to get photos with a very large depth of field to get sharpness from foreground to background in the viewer.
Therefore I need lenses with aperture of 8,11,22 to get the highest DoF (Depth of Field) possible.
Currently only for RaspPI HQ cam lenses with reasonable apertures are provided. Other cams like RaspPi cam V1/V2 have unreasonable apertures.
The problem with lenses for HQ cam is they don't have autofocus and I have to set focus manually. And even worse for stereo cam I have two lenses side by side and I need to manually set focus twice. Using my 3D printer I can create some gears and attach them to the lenses. With one gear in the middle of both lenses I can turn one wheel and both lenses will follow. So the mechanical part for focusing I think I can handle.
The problem for me is how can I detect if the focus is set onto a specific object in my scene?
The small screen that comes with the StereoPI kit isn't reasonable to judge focus very well.
Is there any software solution available? I can think of professional cameras where sharp edges appear in a different color (so called focus peaking) so one can detect focus very quickly. Is this possible with StereoPI V2?
Some other thoughts:
Since the form factor of HQ cam is very big compared to V1/V2, is it possible to attach some kind of aperture to V1/V2 camera?
I am not a expert in optics, but may it is possible to attach a small round metal sheet with a small hole in the middle at the front of the V1/V2 lense to get a aperture similar to 8, 11, 22? Can that work?