The Digital Shotgun - Or The Art Of The Bracket

A recent weekend spent playing with the new Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mk II showed me how useful it would be for macro work and studio product illustration. This column showed some of the ways that the focus bracketing and focus stacking features helped to tame the problem of depth of field. Kudos to Olympus.

Also, my foray to Jandakot airport showed their long telephoto lens and their superb image stablising systems making short work of long-distance coverage in bumpy conditions. Instant desire to own one...and a very successful DIY job done.

But like every successful DIY job, once the thing has been accomplished, you should put away the tools, clean the workbench, and throw away the rest of the pot of red paint that you bought to do the project. But we never do - we look around for something to use up the paint on...

Olympus have lots of buttons on their new mirrorless camera that attract the idle finger. One of them is the one that sets up bracketing - in this case art effects bracketing. One press on the shutter button and the device takes off into a series of interpretations of the scene, stacking them into JPEGS.
Hi-Key, Low Key, Dramatic Contrast, Sketching, Soft Focus, Hard Focus, Monochrome, etc. etc. I think there was Diane Sauce and/or Ennui there in the settings somewhere...

Here are some of the results. I offer them with no comment, other than to say they are well done. If I understood Art I would probably appreciate them more. If they remind you of the results that a bored teenager gets with a mobile app and Instagram, reflect that a bored retiree would be even worse.

There is a good side: If one of these artistic decisions accords with your own vision of the world, you are onto a winner. In that case the camera will do what you want to do consistently and will show you what the results are going to look like out there in the field while you are still shooting. You might be the sort of person who revels in vast long sessions of Photoshopping your images to produce the same effects - in which case we suggest that you shoot RAW and then beat the thing to death yourself. But if you just want it now, this Olympus feature is a good one.

Note: I am also guilty of two-hour Photoshop sessions with forays off into Alien Skin and Nik plug-ins to alter the images. I've got some corkers - but some of the best ones have far exceeded the history feature of the program and I cannot reproduce them again. At least if the Olympus camera gets you into the artistic ballpark, you'll have less smearing to do in the end.