.... The second shot gets more Likes wherever I have posted it so far. The Bee started to slooowly crawl towards me while I was shooting but somehow it all came out okay. I think I had set 8 shot 'slices'.
I was always interested in focus stacking because of close-up/macro DoF limitations - I don't want
ALL my Dragonfly shots to be just sideways on! And Butterflies are
always DoF tricky. But I didn't want to spend so much extra time having to use a tripod, not often practical for insects, and then stacking it all in dedicated software/Photoshop etc afterwards. Also, I found that most, not all, 'conventional' stack results I have seen seemed to alter colours so they looked unnatural. There are absolutely no colour changes in the Olympus final stack combination.
So the Olympus onboard Focus Stacking feature is exactly what I needed and was even one of the several reasons I switched from my beloved Canon gear. There's a learning curve of course but I'm pleased I got off to a good start as it's more encouraging to continue - My assistant Lady Luck was by my side though! I think I should name her 'Lucy' and insist she shares her isolation lockdown with me
I wonder if she can cook.
Another option I love about my Olympus E-M1X is the BKT button on the top plate can be customised to toggle focus stacking On/Off and then a BKT icon displays in the viewfinder together with a box line showing the reduced image area after stacking. The Olympus system reduces the image area of the final combination to compensate for losses due to the subject being too close to the edge of your frame < Your set aspect ratio is preserved.
That BKT toggling button is invaluable when shooting with the Olympus 300mm F/4 Pro (600mm equivalent) which supports Focus Stacking and is a very useful lens for easily spookable Butterflies (for example). It even works when the x1.4 MC-14 is additionally mounted (840mm equivalent) and so this means I can toggle between shooting birds
without stacking and then close-up subjects
with stacking just at the hit of one button.
Shooting Manual-mode and seeing the histogram (optional) in the viewfinder < What more could a photographer want!?
I used to
but now