Burke Flynn Stacks It Here At Camera Electronic

Relax - the car's all right.

Yesterday, Burke gave a great 3-hour display of the new Olympus OM-D E-M10 MkII camera to an appreciative audience. As with many new cameras, the Olympus has a number of features that involve bracketing. One of them is apparently focus bracketing. I was puzzled and asked Burke what it was.

Burke was puzzled.

After the demo we did some experiments here on the editorial desk and found out the answer - and it is a ripper.

Do you do focus stacking with your camera? You know - where you shoot a number of images of a fixed object with a slight change of focus between each shot. Then you put the images into a computer program like Photoshop and it blends them into a single presentation with greatly increased depth of field. It's a sophisticated technique that lets the macro worker overcome some of the optical limitations of shallow depth of field when you are in close.

Well - that what it does...but it does it in-camera and automatically. Wow. You can specify number of shots in the stack...think of it as the number of slices of an apple...and the sort of distance you want between each slice. Then press go and it goes. We tested it on a plastic ruler and found that we could ask for slices 1mm to 10mm wide - and we can ask for 999 of them if needed.

That's a lot more than most programs would handle, or most people would need, but the possibilities it sets up for tabletop or close-up workers is mind boggling.

You still need to use it for completely still objects so exercise your ingenuity ( and Cullmann clamps ) to do this.