Playing With Some Of The Olympus E-M1 Mark II's Special Features

Center of a daffodil blossom at the lens' closest focus position (click to enlarge)
Olympus E-M1 MKII, 12-40mm f/2.8 lens @ 40mm; 1/6th sec. @f/16; ISO 200
Olympus touts this lens' close focusing ability.  One reason I had sold my prior Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8 lens
and bought this one was to have close focusing ability and not have to add a macro lens to my small, lightweight travel kit.

The other day, due to a family obligation, I was saddled in the house and couldn't to out to photograph. That's okay. No complaint. So...I decided to make lemonade out of that lemon. I found a way to photograph, learn and produce a few interesting images inside.
What did I do?  I noticed the daffodils were blooming so I went out and picked one.  I set up my tripod, brought out an old Wimberly Plamp,  a plastic articulating arm with clamps at both ends.  I attached the large clamp to one of the legs of my tripod, then attached the smaller clamp to the the daffodil stem.  I then mounted my new Olympus E-M1 Mark II to the tripod so I could try out some of its special features. After the camera was in position, I manipulated the clamp so the blossom of the daffodil was directly in front of the lens.  I placed the entire setup in front of a glass storm door so outdoor daylight would be as bright as possible but remain indirect.

In this particular case, I wanted to see a) how close the 12-40mm f/2.8 lens would focus and at how good a quality image it could produce at such close focus, b) use the high resolution 50mp feature of the camera, c) try the in-camera focus stacking and d) take the same basic image with focus bracketing, also in-camera, and stack the images in Helicon Focus to see how the two images compared.

I spent about a hour playing around with the various features and I was pleased with the results for my first time using these features on this camera.  I had used the focus bracketing once before on my E-M1 but I really just tried it once.  Here are four images from this enjoyable little educational endeavor with short explanations in each caption.

In-Camera high resolution JPEG (click to enlarge)
E-M1 MKII, 12-40mm f/2.8 lens @ 40mm; 1/30th sec. @ f/8; ISO 200
This is a result of utilizing the high resolution feature in the camera..The camera takes 8 images and then
combines them into a JPEG.  This image is 49.9mp. It can also combine them into a single RAW image.
The point of focus was the very tip of the stamen in the center.  Almost everything else is out of focus.
In actuality, in this image, it was hard to tell any difference between a normal resolution and high resolution.
I'll be using this feature in the future and assessing its usefulness and practicality.

This is an in-camera focus stacked image. The camera takes several images in succession at different
focus distances, then combines them in-camera in a manner which renders the entire subject in focus—if
you do it right. There is a lot of experimentation to be done with this feature as you can adjust
how far the camera changes the focus between each image. The settings range from 1-10.
The focus distance for this image was set for 2.

This image is the result of automatic focus bracketing in-camera.  One can set the camera to make between 2 and 99
images, then assemble them in another piece of software.  Photoshop does it but I prefer Helicon Focus.  In this case
I had the camera make 10 images and initially focused on the outer edge of the center pedals.  Subsequent images
were made with each automatically focused a bit farther from the camera. (click to enlarge)

Lastly, I wanted to pass on two things that I found increased my success rate. First, I recommend manually focusing your lens for close up work when no using the special features.  Cameras, in the past, have been notorious for not aligning the actual autofocus module with the small printed autofocus box in your viewfinder.  You may find your autofocusing just a bit off as the camera may be focusing in a slightly different place than you think.  By manually focusing, you fully control exactly where your lenses is accurately focused.  When you add the magnification feature during manual focus, it is relatively easy.

Second, if you have a camera with a touchscreen LCD with the ability to touch the LCD to focus and expose, that worked perfectly for me.  The Plamp was so sensitive (or should I say unsteady) that if someone walked across the floor on the other side of the room or if I touched the shutter button, the flower would wiggle for a few seconds before becoming stationary once more.  (in some of the special features, the shutter delay was not available and I did not have my remote release with me)  By touching on the LCD exactly where I wanted the camera to focus and expose, there were no movements or vibrations, much to my surprise.  I barely had to touch it for it to focus and compose.  I thought there would be a bit of camera movement when touching the LCD, but I detected none, even in these extreme close up images.

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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