Well, I couldn’t resist. I went on Sony’s website and found the pages with the firmware update (4.00). But upon reading the instructions I found out that since my firmware was at version 1.01, I had to first update my camera to version 1.05 before updating to version 4.00. The warning said that if I went straight to 4.00 it would cause an error and then I wouldn’t be able to fix the problem. Well, the camera gods are a jealous bunch and defying them is very unwise so along with many a grumble and even a few mumbles I went through the procedure twice.
1.01 to 1.05
1.05 to 4.00
And what do you know? It really worked. The drive menu had new options that included focus bracketing. After following the instructions from a YouTube video, I was able to quickly and easily run a quick bracket on a preserved tarantula spider specimen and send it through my focus stacking program (Affinity Photo) and, voila, edge to edge sharpness.
Now this was just a quick test. I had a kid’s party starting and barely got the files stacked before I had to go referee grandkids for Camera Girl. But it was definitely a proof of concept and I can see how this will work for even some field shots. Definitely usable for macro shots of plants like mushrooms and such and even for resting or sedate creatures like resting dragonflies and such. Of course, butterflies are out of the question. But a little testing is bound to bring up other applications.
So, all in all, this is an amazing surprise from Sony. Kudos to them for hearing my cries in the wilderness. Bravo, gentlemen, bravo.
You are mistaken. That’s not a Tarantula, that’s Kamala smiling!
That’s a horrible thing to say … about the spider!
Focus stacking has the same limitations as aperture stacking (HDR), a tripod is needed.
It’s in my camera now but I haven’t tried it. What did you use as software?
I used Affinity Photo. It has a rather simple photo-stacking program. But I don’t know how it stacks up against the competition.
Here’s my 1st experiment. This was shot from about 16” a f6.3. The distance from the near wing to furthest point on geode was 4”. With a standard type shot, depth of field on this would have been in the fractional inch range. I didn’t have a clue how many steps it would take to go from near focus point to furthest so I set it for 25 and just deleted the shots that were focused too deep to be of use. It ended up at 15 stepped images. Good thing that it wasn’t a lot more images to process… Read more »
Nice result. Yes it takes a lot of time and data crunching ability to stitch those brackets.
Tom, this is another tool in the tool box. But it will take me a decent amount of time to figure out things like number of files for different focal intervals. And I guess I’ll have to find out the pluses and minuses for different software packages. And unfortunately I’ll be sidelined for the next two weeks. Well, to be continued.