Dang @sunguramy I’m sorry to hear that, especially after I had recommended it.
Here are some example files if you want to play around with them @broacher https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QnZLO3BmYL4ICY2dKtGUleg-bjEqotPc/view?usp=sharing , please let me know when you’ve downloaded the file so I can delete it as I’m pretty skinny on space in my Google Drive. Hope it helps!
Got 'em. Thanks!
Okay. So I had a couple hours out in the ‘field’ today with tg-5 and tried to put it through some paces – as much as I could for having just skimmed the manual, that is.
A couple things surprised me a bit. Like occasionally if I was trying to go a handheld stack micro mode shot, and I got the message that it didn’t work (understandle, things moved too much, or I did) it would return to the shot preview and lock up. I would press everything and nothing happen. I had to manually release the battery to reset it. But I think it was more prone to that if I left it in bracket micro mode while in ‘idle’ looking for another shot.
It was a bright sunny day so it was really tough to push it past ISO 800 in any mode without washing out. Here’s a keeper I did in ISO 800 (reduced in size for posting) with stacking:
Nice. There seems to be some little streak artifacts which I presume are caused by the stacking process. Easy enough to touch up though. Just to be clear, all the shots I took I ran (batch mode) were the camera RAW through the DxO PureRaw app first, converting them all to DNGs. Most required some tone, color balancing, and cropping in LightRoom, but I didn’t use Lightroom or Photoshop RAW denoising in any of these. Just the denoise and sharpening defaults built into PureRaw’s ‘Prime’ mode.
So tonight I thought I would do some quick simple higher ISO testing using low light. In this case my computer desk without the desklamp on. This allowed me to push the range high.
Not an ideal subject here (a day lily bud) but it was the only thing kicking around and within reach at this time.
So, here’s a crop of sample one a micro at ISO 1600
Sample 2 at ISO 10000.
I tried to do a micro stack in high ISO but discovered that it cuts out at ISO 3200. And this is what that looked like:
I know it’s hard to tell in a screen grab how noisy the result are (it’s not the full 100% rez), but I have to say that overall, I feel confident that I can push well past ISO 800 by using PureRaw, and that’s something that I was really hoping for. Wiggle room and just more possibilities of no-flash or fill lighting. Maybe just a white card in my kit? Anyhow. I’ll keep plugging away. Right now I’m struggling to get the camera and my phone to connect (why is that always such a pain?) and I probably need to go back and read more of the manual.
But again, for a $100 purchase, I am more than pleased.
Oh, one other thing that I notice. I was getting a slightly vague purplish overlay appearing in a lot of low light shots and I figured it out. Remember that anti-reflection/UV coating on the lens’ cover plate that had been scratched to pieces? (that’s why it was so cheap) I guess the ‘cleared area’ without coating in the center of the lens shifted colour from the coating. My next move is to take off the remaining coating remnants along the sides to get a consistent colour source coming through.
Didn’t show up in low ISO though. Fun fun fun.
I probably just need to play with it more, I regularly cave with someone who likes his a lot for in situ macro stuff so I’m sure it is a gotta get used to how it functions thing. It will still be used in the really wet muddy caves that I don’t like taking my other camera to.
Do you know any way to get the flash to syc right with a off camera flash - I have one that actually is light-triggered (so on board camera flash triggers it) but despite it firing it isn’t captured even setting shutter to be slow enough said off camera flash sync. (I can’t get it to talk to any of my radio triggers sadly)
Not sure if you saw my comments above, but the Olympus marketing/engineering department is kicking out a bold face lie about the camera operating at f/18 … the third aperture setting you can select in Aperture Priority mode is nothing more than a darkening filter dropped over the lens. So the second setting of f/2.8 takes you to f/6.3 when you zoom to 4x. That’s the smallest aperture and best depth of field setting you can hope for, which is crappy for macro unless you can focus stack.
reallllly ok i’ll go back up and read, but ffs yeah f/6.3 is nothing for a small macro image.
so i guess i need the ‘microscope’ mode then which i think focus stacks? which means it can’t be a carabid or diplurian or something that is always on the move.
It’s one of the options for Microscope mode. Great for dead things and most plants. But the first mode in the Microscope mode is called (boy, they must have sweated over naming this one) ‘Microscope’. This and the second option, ‘focus stacking’ share the same zoom range, just the stack one does in-camera stack processing.
The third setting, ‘Focus Bracketing’ is essentially the same as Focus Stacking’ but saves each focal ‘slice’ as an individual file for processing afterwards. I think that might make give it more technical, but not necessarily prctical potential for field work. And it just crowds up the preview gallery.
Not sure about ‘Microscopic Control’, the fourth and last option. It gives you a zoom factor on the screen, but other than that… same limitations optically?
The whole f-stop weasel phrasing irks me too. But then, I knew about that going in and I still like the power of this rugged little pocket machine.
When you look at the lens design you can see why they went this way though. How do you squeeze an iris in there? From that standpoint, I look at this cam as a kind of ‘footbridge’ camera. It fills the space between a phone and a real bridge cam.
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