Getting in the Spirit

SONY DSC

Some snow falling today surprised me into remembering how close Christmas is.  Of course, I dasn’t say such a thing aloud in Camera Girl’s presence or she would toss an oven mitt or a ladle at me for my oblivious attitude as she soldiers on in her pre-Christmas baking and cooking marathon.  She is calculating cooking and storage times down to the nanosecond as enormous quantities of baked goods, meat, pasta, cheese and vegetables are processed in the run up to the big event.  My party line is that I am available to help in any capacity she sees fit.  This merely elicits rueful head-shaking and eye-rolling.  Well, that’s my story.  And anyway, I serve many useful functions.  I am the snow removal department and I also serve as chauffeur if the roads seem too tricky for her.  And I have a thousand and one other jobs.  For instance, I’m in charge of the yearly Christmas card design and procurement.  Well, of course.  I’m a photographer.  But such things are easily forgotten by someone who can point to a table groaning under the weight of a feast.  Well, we also serve who wait and eat.  But who’s keeping score anyway?

I have all of next week off and I’m looking forward to the get togethers.  But I’ve been keeping an eye on the situation in Washington.  It’s almost unbelievable how feckless and dishonest the Biden administration intends to be right up to the final day of their reign of terror.  Biden’s pardoning of hideously evil people would be shameful if Biden and his cronies had any shame.  I have to assume that there was a price list posted somewhere for the scum of the earth to figure out whether they could afford to be freed by Hunter and Jill and whoever else wrote out the pardons for Joe to scribble his signature on.  And the Republicans don’t disappoint with their nitwitted attempts to pass legislation in the House of Representatives.  Only the dishonesty and corruption of the Democrats allows the GOP to seem better by comparison.  But it really is a sad sideshow to behold.

The clowns and the cretins, the monsters and the madmen; the whole cast of this insane drama that is playing out on the deck of a sailing ship headed straight for an iceberg.  And at this point Donald Trump is the captain and he and his crew are locked in a cutlass fight with the usual pirates and so no one is steering the ship.  Well, it should give us a reason to pop popcorn in 2025.

But this is all beside the point.  We have Christmas to celebrate and the relief from knowing that somehow, we dodged the bullet of a Kamala Harris presidency.  And, sure, so many things will go wrong in 2025.  Trump will waffle, Democrats will lie and cheat, bureaucrats will obfuscate and interfere and Republicans will prove themselves inept and obtuse.  In other words, standard operating procedure.  But things will be better than they’ve been the last four years.  God willing, the wars will start to die down.  Energy prices will come back to Earth and that will tend to drive down the prices of everything else.  And the biggest bonus, we may never see any of the Bidens for the rest of our lives.  That alone is worth a hallelujah.

Bring Back Our Jobs

In the 1990’s America began off-shoring almost our entire industrial footprint.  I saw some of that migration first hand.  China hired American engineering companies with the technology and experience to build petrochemical synthesis plants.  And they built them in pieces, shipped them to remote sites in China and then assembled and even started them up for the Chinese.  On their own it would have taken the Chinese generations to learn all the particular technologies and avoid all the hazards in running plants that produce all the myriads of organic materials that the US chemical engineering companies like Dupont pioneered in the early twentieth century.

And we did it on purpose.

Now multiply that by the number of other products that we used to make in America and you have an inkling of the betrayal that Wall Street has wreaked on us.  And the result is the wreckage that we call the Rust Belt.  But it’s not just the Midwest.  Every area of the country has been hollowed out.  Even the most cutting-edge manufacturing, the most valuable computer chips are made in Taiwan.  And it’s even worse than that.  Even our food is now imported from Asia and South America.  That is how much American businesses hate us.  So, if I want to sum the whole thing up, the boardrooms of American business eliminated the American middle class to globalize their operations and minimize their labor costs.

And reversing this project is what I think is the highest priority of anyone who loves this country and the people who call themselves Americans.  It really doesn’t matter to me if the people who work to fix this call themselves Republicans or Democrats.  Populist might be the closest thing to a label for the project.  Obviously, anyone who is getting most of his income from Wall Street lobbyists and insider trading tips is not on this team.  It’s not Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi or the Bushes.  Maybe it’s Donald Trump.  He sounds like he understands some of what’s going on.  He talks about tariffs and that’s part of what needs to be looked at.  But where I see the tariffs helping is putting them on American companies who try to sell cars and other products made in Mexico and Cananda and elsewhere as if they were “Made in America.”

We’re missing about a hundred million good manufacturing jobs in this country.  That’s about what it would take to restore the middle class in this country.  Of course that will do a lot of damage to China, India, Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America.  Well, that’s too bad.  Charity begins at home.

On-shoring American manufacturing will take decades.  Of course it will.  It took forty years to off-shore it.  But every step the government takes to worsen the economics of off-shore manufacturing will work to improve the job prospects for our grandchildren.  And now is the time for legislation.  The Republicans have (slim) majorities in both houses of Congress and a sympathetic president.  All that is needed is for Trump to co-opt a few Democrat votes.  Who knows, he might even get someone like Bernie Sanders to sign on for some of the votes.

But the important thing is to prevent this country from turning into a feudal system with the super-rich lording it over a peasant class hanging on by the skin of their teeth.  There is still a chance to turn this around.  Come on Mr. Trump, to make America great again, you have to resurrect the middle class.  Bring back our jobs.

A Million Miles Away

In the last week or so there have been a number of reports about large drones flying over New Jersey and New York City.  When reporters have asked the Department of Defense and the FBI about this they were that the drones are unidentified.  But at the same time there was no sense of urgency by these agencies to calm the civilian population by assuring them that an investigation is in effect.  It was more or less a shrug of the shoulders and the comment that local law enforcement would handle these mysterious craft.

A congressman from New Jersey posited that there was a rumor that the drones were Iranian and that they were associated with a “mothership” based off the east coast in the Atlantic.  The Pentagon spokesman denied this and said there was no indication that the drones were foreign or controlled by adversaries of the United States.  But at the same time there was no indication how this could be known if the drones were unidentified.

So, then what is going on?

Well, of course I can’t prove anything.  But it occurs to me that Iran makes a lot of military drones and Russia uses an enormous number of military drones in the Ukraine war.  And both those countries are looking to make trouble for the United States because of military actions we have currently going on in their neighborhoods, in other words Syria and Ukraine.

Maybe they’re sending a message that they can retaliate for the attacks going on in their world.  Or maybe they’re scouting around to find the easiest or the most valuable targets to hit.  Well, isn’t that something!

And, of course, all of this is in response to US initiatives that were activated after the Democrats lost the November election.  After November 5th the United States gave Ukraine permission to use long range missiles in the Russian homeland.  And of course the toppling of the Assad regime by American proxies just occurred in the last week.  So, the State Department and the Department of Defense unleash chaos around the world and the blowback from it will hit home about the time President Trump is inaugurated.  Isn’t that something!

For me this just reinforces what kind of psychopaths we have running our foreign policy.  Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland play their color revolution games with foreign countries and the blowback will be felt by innocent Americans and especially by our military that shouldn’t be put in harm’s way for egregious adventures that only alienate the rest of the world and benefit no one except the military contractors that feed off of the arms buildup that follows after these obscene plans are put in action.

Well, there’s basically nothing that can be done until that undead creature is finally packed into his mummy case and carted away from the White House.  Maybe we’ll get lucky and the other shoe doesn’t drop before January 20th and Donald Trump can inform our adversaries that sanity has reasserted itself over US foreign policy and that all ticking time bombs will be deactivated and we can start from a simple position of mutual hatred but without the added factor of sociopaths with delusions of grandeur running foreign policy for the world’s deadliest weapons stockpile.

Well, anyway, I’ve got my fingers crossed and I’m usually a pretty lucky guy.  It’s less than 40 days but why does it seem like a million miles away?

Michael Anton to Return to a Trump Administration Job

“Donald Trump announced Sunday his selection of Michael Anton to be the director of policy planning at the State Department under the prospective secretary, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Anton held a position on the National Security Council during Trump’s first administration, and was also appointed by the president to the National Board for Education Sciences.”

 

Anton to Lead State Department Policy Planning

Anton famously wrote the “Flight 93” essay during Donald Trump’s 2016 run claiming that despite any personal shortcomings Republicans needed to embrace Donald Trump to avoid the disaster that a Hillary Clinton extension to the Obama presidency would entail.  And in retrospect he was very right.

On a personal not Anton once quoted from an OCF post which I found very surprising.  The power of the internet.

Well, best of luck to Anton in his new position.  I hope he remembers the hopes and fears of people who read his words and now hope that Donald Trump’s new administration begins to apply the philosophy that he has avowed and make America great again.  But at the very least they should strive to make America sane again.

Calibrating a Focus Bracket with the Sony 90mm Macro Lens on the A7 IV

TomD brought up a lot of good points about the limitations and vagaries of focus stacking so I tried to get a better handle on the mechanics of the settings used.

And when in need of a handy dandy close up subject I hauled out my extremely dead tarantula spider.  He has the benefit of being a rather large macro subject.  So I arranged the camera on a tripod at the minimum focal distance and set the bracket spacing to 4 out of 10 and selected 125 frames.  After the end I measured the length of the spider that was in focus in the bracket.  It came to about 2.5 inches.  Now this is a ballpark because there was an angle to the camera.  but this gives a decent idea of how many shots are needed to cover a depth of field.

Here is the first bracket frame

Here’s the last (125th) frame

Here is the stacked composite

And finally here is a photo taken from the same distance at a very small aperture (f\18) as a comparison.

Now this stack took 50 minutes to crank out on my laptop.  Is it worth the time and effort?  I guess that’s a personal choice.  But I’m kind of enjoying playing around with a new technique.  And that’s probably the nerd in me showing through.

 

Update:

TomD commented:

As a lifelong certified arachnophobe, 2.5” inches is entirely too big (by at least an order of magnitude) for a live spider to be.

Thanks for the experiment! Enlightening!

Even with 4 steps/per frame x 125 frames, or 500 steps, it still didn’t get the abdomen. So 500 steps only covered around 1.75”?

That’s extremely unintuitive and approaching unusable.

As I said in an earlier post, the software that I played with at the camera club would have the entire object with 8-10 exposures.

Maybe that’s more a function of the lens than the software. I’ve done a lot of macro work using several lenses and noticed that macro lenses with a very close focus all have a razor thin usable depth of field. I wonder what would happen if you took a good prime lens in the 85+mm range, moved it back and tried the same experiment at something like f8?

You would have to crop in to get the same image size but I’ve noticed that ou A7IV’s can be cropped quite a ways and still have great IQ’s (image quality).

Using the setup specs of your experiment, I’d say that the upper dof limit is in the inch range.

photog replied:

Tom, I’m going to play around with this function.  I want to see what I can do with it.  It seems like an interesting tool that I might find some good applications for.  But I can see that it might not have any compelling uses for most people.

Sony A7 IV Focus Bracketing Test – 16NOV2024

Welcome to the further adventures of me playing around with the newly added focus bracketing function on my Sony A7IV camera.  Although I was using the Sony 90mm macro lens this isn’t a macro bracket.  I set up a few small statues in a location that caught the late afternoon light and ran a hundred shots with a medium setting on the focus change.  I’ve attached the first file (1) and the last file (100) followed by the merged product.

(1)

 

(100)

 

merged product

 

Now this isn’t all that an exciting test.  Afterwards I though I probably should have included a shot at a very small aperture like F8 or F16 as a comparison of what can be done the old fashioned way without the software magic.  But I didn’t think of that before.

Anyway, just another test as I play around with my fun new toy.

Focus Bracketing Inside the Sony A7 IV – Part 1

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.

Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus. But His Name is Sony!

At this point I considered attaching a video of the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel’s Messiah.  I had been waiting and hoping and praying that Sony would add focus bracketing to my Sony A7 IV camera by a firmware update but had more or less given up.

They did it!  Well, they made the update but I haven’t updated my camera yet.

But I watched the video below and did a quick jig around my house and am now calming down enough to type this post.

Ah hell, let’s add the Hallelujahs!

TomD replied:

Really!!??

I’ve been wanting focus bracketing for years! Years ago, FB was a relatively expensive windows or apple program and you had to shoot with the camera tethered to a computer. What a PIA.

I’m gonna update right now.

It can immediately help with a number of different types of shots I do. Aircraft in a museum for example. Museums are crowded with a constant problem of subject isolation. Far enough out to get the entire plane in the shot and there is a LOT of stuff competing for attention. Close enough with a wide angle and there is the depth of field problem.

photog replied:

I had to do two updates.  First I had to go from version 1.01 to 1.05.  Then 1.05 to 4.00.  But it worked.  I’ll load up the trial macro focus bracket soon.  It’s much easier than the damn tether.

Whiling Away the Summer Days

As July draws to a close, I’ve been indulging in inconsequential trifles.  Yesterday I watched the remake of “Total Recall” with Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel.  The original with Arnold Schwarzenegger was a silly movie.  So was this.  But I think I liked the recent one better.  Not that it was any more sensible or was a masterpiece of cinematic brilliance but it was entertaining.

Then tonight we watched the first episode of the spy series “The Old Man” with Jeff Bridges.  And once again it wasn’t deathless theater but it was very entertaining.  We’re also watching the “Justified” sequel I guess you could call it.  Now, I really liked the original series a lot.  I don’t know that I’ll like this as much but it’s well done and definitely in the same vein as the earlier series.  So lately I’m not hating tv.

And since it stopped raining every minute, I’ve had a chance to get outside and do some macrophotography of bugs and flowers.  And that’s a lot of fun.  I’ve been testing out the advantages and disadvantages of using continuous autofocus with fast moving insects.  The primary disadvantage is that for the Sony A7IV camera magnified view is unavailable in continuous autofocus mode.  So, for instance, if you’re trying to get the eyes of a bee or butterfly perfectly focused you have to guess if the autofocus is precisely on the eye.  In single-shot autofocus I can engage a 5.5X magnified view that will let me see whether the eye or whatever else I’m trying to nail is perfect.  But often when these critters are crawling around, they can move out of focus almost immediately.  Plus, the magnified view ends as soon as the shutter is engaged and so it’s necessary to reactivate it after every photo.

Based on what I’ve seen in the last couple of days I’m starting to think that continuous autofocus is the way to go.  Especially if I use high speed multiple exposures (spray and pray mode).  This ends up filling up my memory card (and hard drive!) but the chance of getting the perfect shot is much more likely than with the single shot autofocus and single exposure mode.  Plus, it’s easier and as I’ve always admitted I’m an extremely lazy man.

And I’ve continued on my program of getting together with the grandsons one by one.  Last Saturday I had the twelve-year-old fellow over and he wanted a Star Wars marathon.  Luckily this was the “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.”  I had forgotten just how bad the Ewoks were.  I also forgot just how goofy the scripts were.  Harrison Ford spends most of his time hammering away at some control components of the Millenium Falcon while whining about how it wasn’t his fault.  But we bonded over our shared belief that Imperial Stormtroopers were all pathetic losers without any detectable skills as warriors.  And finally, I rediscovered my disdain for Yoda.  As far as I could determine he was always wrong and of no value as a teacher or anything else.

On the upcoming Saturday, the sixteen-year-old is coming over and I believe it will be a “Lord of the Rings” film festival.  That should be fun.  For dessert he’s requested original Klondike Bars, of which I wholly approve.  It should be epic.

So, all of these things provide a welcome distraction from the slow-motion train wreck that is our national government.  I sometimes wondered what it must have been like to live through the more terrible chapters of the Roman Empire.  I think I now have a better idea.  Joe Biden is Tiberius and I guess Hunter is Caligula.  The FBI is the Praetorian Guard and we’re the rabble existing on bread and circuses.  But even if Tiberius was as sexually depraved as Joe, at least he was an able military leader.  Watching what Joe is doing to our foreign policy, or allowing others to do to our foreign policy, is frightening.

But enough doom and gloom.  Though we are perched on the slopes of Vesuvius we will eat, drink and be merry.  July is almost consumed but it will be relished to the dregs.

Sony A7 IV to Get Focus Stacking

So I check out the Sony camera rumors at (where else?) sonyalpharumors.com pretty regularly.  So what do I see today?

And at the bottom of the short article it says

One reliable source told me that the Sony A7IV will get a new firmware update 2.0 within the next couple of days! Another source told me that the new firmware update will include Focus Stacking.

Now focus stacking is a wonderful option for a macro-photographer.  Instead of hooking up some hokey laptop program or a manual focus advance trigger you just select the focus stacking option and let the camera do the work.  Now Olympus gave this option to its customers years ago.  But Sony, this giant electronics powerhouse isn’t up to the simple firmware update it would take.  So seeing this really got me excited.

But sonyalpharumors is called rumors for a reason.  I’d say the chance of focus stacking being in the update is 10%.  But hope springs eternal.  So fingers crossed.

 

Update:

This was a total myth.  Nothing came of it.  The only hopeful sign is that Sony is now beginning to provide some upgrades to their cameras on a pay basis.  Maybe that presages a larger effort to provide firmware upgrades that people would pay for.