Today I intended to do some politics. I read a bunch of articles I checked the various dissidents to see what was ticking them off and I thought about “what this country really needs.”
And I came up with nada.
Basically, the Democrats are convinced they’ve won everything and the country backs them up 100%. And the GOP establishment think they’ve shut down Trump so they’re pretty smug too. Well, they’re both mostly wrong but since nothing works better than to give the people what they voted for I can’t think of a thing to say. Let’s see how bad they screw up the country this coming year.
So instead, I decided to have some fun today. I did a couple more of those focus stack macrophotography exercises on Nancy Pelosi’s prettier and more personable younger sister, Medusa.
So, this is kind of a bone of contention between Sony and me. They’ve never provided their cameras with a focus stack capability so I have to use work-arounds. There’s a Bluetooth remote “commander” that will send a signal to the camera to move the focus back or forth by a small increment and then I can trigger an exposure and then repeat the process by however many exposures needed to get everything in focus piece by piece. It works but it’s painfully manual. I also have a tiny software program on my laptop that automates the process but then I have to lug the laptop around in the field.
Other camera makers have added the programming to shoot focus brackets automatically in the camera. One camera maker, Olympus even has the camera “stack” the bracket into a single composite file automatically. Now there’s a company that loves its customers. Sony? Well miracle of miracles they just added bracketing to the brand new A7R V. So now the software exists in Sony’s system. Will they retrofit it into some of the more recent cameras through a firmware upgrade. Don’t make me laugh!
So here is poor photog, Sony’s laughing stock with his workarounds and his decade plus of Sony tone deaf customer service. Will he never learn?
Here are some of the bracketed files.
For the first stack I used six files. This didn’t quite get everything in focus in the first stack.
Next time I took sixteen files and the final product was a lot better.
