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peter_4059
26-12-2018, 01:56 PM
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 :thumbsup:
RickS
26-12-2018, 04:38 PM
Nice score from Santa :)
peter_4059
26-12-2018, 06:44 PM
Thanks Rick. I think I'll get quite a bit of use out of it. Plenty of bugs in Queensland - especially spiders.
RickS
26-12-2018, 07:10 PM
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
26-12-2018, 07:39 PM
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
26-12-2018, 08:06 PM
There's some specialised software like Helicon Focus but you can also use older versions of Photoshop: https://petapixel.com/2014/09/07/tutorial-easily-focus-stack-using-photoshop-feature-probably-didnt-know/
peter_4059
26-12-2018, 09:17 PM
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
27-12-2018, 11:03 AM
Some more bugs from this morning. I need to practice holding the camera still!
peter_4059
27-12-2018, 03:42 PM
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.