Recently I wrote about using the in-camera focus stacking on the Olympus TG-6 for macro photography, today I thought I'd push it as hard as I can to test the limits of this camera. The first idea was to create multiple inage stacks (by pressing the shutter repeatedly) and then stack them all together using Helicon Focus. This was ... partly successful. My first test subject was ... a pencil. I made 9 image stacks then fed them into Helicon.
The problem is that no matter how hard I tried I couldn't keep the camera from moving between stacks - any movement at all degrades the final Helicon stack. The best I managed was three aligned stacks (3x15=45 images), which is the pencil you see above.
I then moved on to wildlife. With a small spider (Diplostyla concolor), about the same size as the pencil tip in the above image, I couldn't manage to get multiple stacks without camera movement - this was the best, a single set of 15 images.
When I tried with the bug Drymus ryei, the same thing happened, but the result still wasn't bad. So it was time for the big head to head: Olympus TG-6 versus Sony a6500 with Sony 90mm macro lens - a camera with a 12MP sensor versus a setup with a 24MP sensor costing four times as much.
And the result was ... well the Sony is better (duuh) (click on the photos for larger images), but the TG-6 gives it a run for its money, costs a fraction of the price and fits in a shirt pocket. Good job TG-6!
I could of course carry on with this nonsense by putting the TG-6 on a tripod and using the Olympus OI.Share app to remote trigger the camera. But that, I'm sure you agree, would just be silly...
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