So today I'm out in the same field as always and today I'm gonna try to do some focus bracketing in the focus bracketing mode of my Olympus OM-1 camera. Earlier I only used the in-body stacking mode which tries to compile a focus stack as a JPEG in the camera. And that mode has some limitations.
You can only take up to 15 images at a time and it always has to stop for a while after the stack to work on assembling it. And I saw that some of my favorite macro photographers on Instagram seem to be using the bracketing mode instead. Then you can take up to a hundred I think or even more maybe photos at a time.
And you have to do the stacking yourself in the computer afterwards. But I think it might be a better way to do it. So today I'm gonna try that and you're gonna follow with me But before we get started, maybe indoors Michael can quickly just walk us through the settings that I'm using today Yeah, so basically I'm using the bracketing mode and not the mode called focus stacking in the camera and the bracketing mode I have set 30 photos as the maximum limit for the stack and then I use a focus differential of 4 or Because after some testing this seems to be optimal when I'm using the Olympus 60mm lens together with the Raynox 250. That step size seemed to be just enough to never have any gaps in the stack.
Thank you indoors Michael. Now let's find some insects. I noticed that you can abort the stack by just pressing the shutter one more time and that's great because 30 shots can be...
Far more than enough in many situations and I don't want to weigh down on the flash battery and take too many photos if I don't have to. So that's great. Maybe I should actually increase the number of shots a little bit because I can always abort it when I see that I've reached the end of the insect and then there's no point in doing further stacking. Another benefit with the focus bracketing mode over the focus stacking mode is that with the focus bracketing mode you always know that the first photo is at where you're focusing right now and then it just focuses in from there.
With the focus stacking mode it seems to kind of alternate between focusing where you focus at the beginning and then before that and then after that and it feels like you have less control and a bigger chance of problems with your stack if the insect moves slightly. So yeah it feels like it's going pretty well so far but it's only indoors Michael who knows how the stacks are turning out. I cannot know yet because yeah I'm only taking the photos.
Let's see if we can stack this thing and if it will look any good. Really hard to hold still. I should have done like this.
I should rest the subject on the lens. Then it's much easier. Let's try again.
Yeah that was a lot easier. I felt like the image was a lot more stable so probably that is the one that I can stack successfully later. My poor poor camera. I don't know how many times the monopod has fallen over. By the way if you're interested and curious about what cameras I use to film my videos and also what kind of gear I'm using for macro photography you can always check my website link in the description for a page with all the stuff that I use and as always I write the specific stuff that I'm using in this video in the video description directly as well.
I didn't find too many insects out there only like really really fast ants and I'm not too keen on photographing them right now when I'm trying to do focus stacking So for the flash to be able to take longer stacks than like 10 photos I lowered the strength on the flash from 1 16th to 1 32 sometimes that means that I need to up the ISO to 400 but I think it might be worth it to get a deeper stack without any interruptions in the flash Finally some insects that were sitting fairly still. What are those? Are they some kind of aphids with wings or what do you call them?
I've almost never gotten a good photo of one of these very tiny black bugs One thing I think it's very important to remember when you're doing focus stacking at these magnifications and I tend to forget this myself as well, I have to constantly remind me, is that if something is sitting for example on a leaf like this and i'm trying to focus stack it it's usually not enough to hold the camera separately because it will never be stable enough to get a good stack or it's like very very hard what you always should do is try to hold the leaf that the insect is sitting on and then support the hand that you're holding it with the lens then you get a lot more stability and a lot lot higher chances of the stack succeeding. So always try to remember this. Rest the lens on the hand that you're holding the subject with and you will get a lot better results. So yeah, now I've tried the bracketing mode and from a user experience perspective, outdoors, taking photos, I really love it. I prefer it over the stacking mode because I don't have to wait too long after the photos are taken to be able to take new photos because in the stacking mode the camera tends to freeze up for quite a while while it's assembling the stack.
I don't have any of that here even though of course it has to save to the memory card which takes a little while. But overall great experience and I can stop the stack whenever I want by just pressing the shutter again so I don't have to take more photos than needed. But the most important question maybe is how the post-processing experience is. How did you find that indoors Michael?
Maybe you can wrap up this video and tell us your conclusions about whether we should use the bracketing mode or the stacking mode on Olympus cameras. Thank you for that! Outdoors Michael.
Well as you saw in this video quite a few of the stacks that I did are not pretty. Like there are some obvious artifacts and mistakes in them. But I still wanted to leave those in the video just to give you a true picture of how it looks when you're out for an hour or two just shooting stacks and then simply just going with the default stacking that you get in Photoshop.
You do align layers and then blend layers. And what I show in this video is exactly what I got without any further modifications. Sometimes it looks really bad, sometimes it looks great.
These are a couple of examples of photos where it looks really bad according to me. And you often get that, it's really hard to do stacking even if you hold completely still. But I got one stack that I was very very happy with and that is this photo of this yellow ladybug sitting on my hand.
I'm really happy with how this photo turned out and this is also just a simple stack of like seven photos that I just imported into Photoshop and just did a quick stack and it can look great. One of my main learnings from this photo walk was that if you have a very fast memory card I just bought a new one that's like 260 megabytes per second in write speed so it does it really fast. And if you're using the bracketing mode, it's really easy to take far too many photos.
I came home with 1,600 photos and it took almost a whole day just to go through them and try to do the stacks in the computer. And to be honest, it wasn't a lot of fun. It was quite frustrating. So my major learning from this video is that I should default to not bracketing or stacking. I should default to just have single picture mode.
I go around taking macro photos that way and when I discover that an insect is sitting still, is cooperative and is a good subject for stacking or bracketing, then I activate the bracketing mode which I will have bound to a button on my camera and then I do some bracketing. That way I don't waste photos where it's not needed or where it's not possible. Of these 1600 photos that I took today, most of them were just wasted on insects that were moving too fast to do any stacks.
So it's just a waste of time and I recommend you to be very mindful when you're doing your stacks. Other than that, the bracketing mode is great for the reasons that I told in this video. I will for sure continue doing stacking in the bracketing mode and not in the focus stacking mode. The bracketing mode according to me has mostly just upsides and yeah I really loved the experience of that. That's it for this video.
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