Daphne

I've now photographed this each of the last three days, but I didn't post the earlier versions. All were focus stacks, but the camera bracketing was done in different ways. For the first one I used my usual method, namely an Olympus with the built-in focus bracketing option and about 40 pictures. Then the second time I thought I would try Panasonic's built-in post focus feature. This really wasn't successful for this extreme close up - the camera decides the nearest point and takes images until the limit is reached, or I guess no points are found in focus - the results are saved to a video, and this then has to be processed in PS to extract stills, and then blend them. It wasn't able to accurately define the very closest point, and because of exposure setting limitations for the video I had to crank up the ISO and still use quite a wide aperture. It also requires more post processing, and you only get stills from the 4K video, not full res RAW. Today's final version was taken with a Panasonic GH4 again, but using the Android app GSimpleRelease (not a Panasonic product), which allows the camera to be focused on both the nearest and furthest points, and a rather arbitrary step size to be set. I found this the most convenient, as really the only thing that is a bit trial and error is the step size, whereas with the Olympus method both the step size and number of pictures are rather arbitrary, and you are not sure whether you will end up with a lot of photos at greater distances than you want, or not enough so that not all of the subject is in focus.