FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

[evenwind]

There was time, many decades ago, when I could be found walking thru the woods with a Nikon FTn and a shoulder-mounted, manual, 400mm f8 lens, looking for birds to annoy. I'd like to think that I knew a bit about photography back then, especially about the shutter speed/f-stop/depth-of-field compromise. These days, if I'm not taking pics of the family, I'm taking pics of my plants. And I'm using a "simple" point-and-shoot camera. I've been wasting a lot of virtual film trying to get whole flowers in focus in Macro mode. I was recently looking thru my camera (Olympus TG-4) manual for I forget what and came across a pretty neat feature. You can set it in a version of Macro mode that automatically takes multiple pics at slightly different focal points and then "magically" combines them into one pic with what amounts to a deep depth-of-field. You wind up with two pics - the original and the processed one. I kinda wish that I'd bothered to read about this feature when I first got the camera but reading the manual is for losers, right? And there are probably other point-and-shoots out there with something similar - maybe it's even a common feature? Anyhow, RTFM!

[nimbulan]

The technique is called focus stacking. It's quite necessary for a lot of macro work but landscape photographers are known to use it too.

I don't think it's too common to have in-camera support but I've done it with software on my computer a number of times.

[evenwind]

So it's a known "thing". Cool! (I really didn't think Olympus invented it just for a point-and-shoot, but you never know.) Thanks for the info.