Tag: macrophotography

Sony A7 IV to Get Focus Stacking

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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.

 

5DEC2022 – OCF Update – More Focus Stacks

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner, Photography, Reclaiming the Family , ,

Today I was part of the long chain of knowledge that begins with the “the master of those who know” and extends all the way to my four year old granddaughter.  In the spirit of Aristotle we recreated the dialectic on the various animal classes.  I tried to explain the reason why a grasshopper was different from a mouse.  We talked about the higher animals and the lower animals and I even got around to explaining why dinosaurs are related to lizards and birds.  After about a half hour she’d had enough and we went back to a match game for dinosaurs.  And after that back to Candy Land.  Well I’d still give Princess Sack of Potatoes the intellectual edge over Plato but I think I need to get some high quality color phtots of different animals to make the discussion more compelling for her.

Once Camera Girl led her granddaughter into the kitchen to bake some pumpkin bread I decided this was a good day for some macrophotography fun.

So I took some focus stacks.  I had a tiny old Roman coin and a long dead beetle lying around so they were my subjects.

15DEC2022 beetle stack
15DEC2022 coin face 2 stack
15DEC2022 coin tail stack

The focus intervals don’t seem to have been sufficient to give a perfect stack.  But i’m using a Sony Remote Commander and it doesn’t have any calibration for the focus change.  I have a little program I can use while tethered to my laptop but the A7 IV requires a USB 3 cable and I only have USB 1 or 2.  So I’ll have to go out and get one.  But still a nice exercise.

All in all a day well spent.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 04JUL2022 – Photo

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

 

100 trillion zimbabwe front.jpg
100 trillion zimbabwe front.jpg

Here’s an amusing part of my collection, the highest denomination banknote ever issued: a $100 trillion “dollar” (10^14th) Zimbabwean note issued in 2008. The actual monetary value of the note when issued was somewhat less that the worth of 8 ounces of used cat litter. Shortly thereafter the Zimbabwean currency system totally collapsed with the locals instead temporarily adopting 6 packs or Heineken beer (really!) as a basis for economic exchange until the US dollar became the de facto currency.

In the meantime, Zimbabwean currency in various denominations from a few hundred millions up to the pictured 10^14th became available for amusement purposes for a (US) dollar or two on ebay. I bought twenty or thirty of the pictured notes and gave all but two away as joke gifts. But, as it turn out, the joke ended up being on me. Fourteen years later, the highest denomination bill ever issued has become scarce and is now selling for $100 to $300 US dollars.

One wonders whether some enterprising Chinese group has started counterfeiting the notes yet? (Another story but the Chinese counterfeiters are the bane of the existence of collectors of pretty much anything valuable.)

26JUN2021 – Photography – Focus Stack – Eyed Click Beetle

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Continuing with my dead insect theme here is a large Eyed Click Beetle – Alaus oculatus who has joined my museum of dead bugs.  No anthropomorphizing this insect with a name like Bob.  I’ll call him Clicky because he used to click before he became dead.  Camera Girl felt sad because he was going to meet his maker.  But then I told her he was eating her vegetables.  She said everybody’s got to eat but I think it put things in perspective.