More fun with macro

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Santa brought some new toys yesterday - an Olympus 60mm macro lens and a Manfrotto geared head for the tripod. I've been testing it out on some stationary objects yesterday and I've been out in the garden this morning to see if the bees were prepared to cooperate.

The 60mm macro comes to focus a lot closer to the object than the zoom I was using earlier. The bees were not quite as keen to have the camera as close and spent a lot of time buzzing around the camera rather than landing on the flowers.

Thanks for looking. Comments and advice always welcome

[RickS (Rick)]

Nice score from Santa

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Thanks Rick. I think I'll get quite a bit of use out of it. Plenty of bugs in Queensland - especially spiders.

[RickS (Rick)]

G'day Peter,

I was thinking about playing with focus stacking one of these days. It looks like fun. If only I had some spare tine

Cheers,
Rick.

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Originally Posted by RickS

G'day Peter,

I was thinking about playing with focus stacking one of these days. It looks like fun. If only I had some spare tine

Cheers,
Rick.

The EM10 can do focus bracketing however I'm not sure how to process the resulting group of images. I think the later versions of PS have a function to do this however I don't have that software.

[RickS (Rick)]

Originally Posted by peter_4059

The EM10 can do focus bracketing however I'm not sure how to process the resulting group of images. I think the later versions of PS have a function to do this however I don't have that software.

There's some specialised software like Helicon Focus but you can also use older versions of Photoshop: https://petapixel.com/2014/09/07/tut...ly-didnt-know/

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Originally Posted by RickS

There's some specialised software like Helicon Focus but you can also use older versions of Photoshop: https://petapixel.com/2014/09/07/tut...ly-didnt-know/

Might be cheaper to purchase Helicon that get a version of PS that does focus stacking. Here's another option...

http://www.picolay.de/index.html

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Some more bugs from this morning. I need to practice holding the camera still!

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

More experimenting this afternoon. This time with focus stacking using Picolay. www.picolay.de

The EM10 mkII has a focus bracketing function that takes a number of frames with a small step in focus between each. The attached images are the first and last of these together with the stacked image. There are some artifacts, probably due to my lack of experience using this software however I think it did a pretty good job for a free piece of software.