G80 - Mainly 2017 to 2018

In mid 2017 I bought a Panasonic G80 as an upgrade to the G5. For the most part it was a mild upgrade with various incremental improvements, but it had two new functions that were to prove important as time went on:  it could do aperture bracketing; and it could do focus bracketing and post focus video, both of which could be used to derive images for stacking. I used both of these new features for botanical subjects. 

For invertebrates, as with the G5, I mixed use of the G80 with use of the FZ330 for invertebrates, in both cases using close-up lenses, and not using a macro lens on the G80 for invertebrates. (The reasons why I didn't use a macro lens are covered in more detail in a later post.) At this point I think I was using the Canon 70D less and less, and probably not at all, for invertebrates.

The FZ330, which I had bought 9 months prior to getting the G80, was also able to do post focus but I only used it for a handful of experimental stacks. Some of the results were pleasing, but the stacking presented too many problems for it to be attractive. 

Unlike the FZ330, the G80 did in-camera focus stacking. I soon discovered that this was flawed for my purposes, producing grossly unusable results some of the time and, for those that did work, not providing as much flexibility as an external application such as Helicon Focus or Zerene Stacker. 

I produced some stacking results for botanical subjects with the G80 that I liked, using both focus stacking and post focus, but I found I preferred post focus. (The reasons why are covered in more detail in a later post.) However, my use of stacking was intermittent. I was getting better with Helicon Focus, which I preferred to Zerene Stacker, but still encountering enough problems with the stacking to discourage my use of it more than occasionally. It seemed like rather hard work. And it produced results that if I looked closely had flaws that didn't trouble me too much but made me hesitant to show them to other people, which in turn made me doubt whether I should really like these flawed images.

Instead of stacking with the G80 for botanical subjects I started using aperture bracketing. This let me capture a set of images from f/2.8 to f/22 with a single shutter press. I could then choose which one I preferred the look of later while doing the post processing. I found this gave me better results more often, easier and faster, than I could with single shots. I soon started to use aperture bracketing most of the time for botanical subjects. This worked best with the Olympus 60mm macro, and the combination of G80, 60mm macro and aperture bracketing quickly took over from the Canon 70D as my favoured setup for botanical scenes. Since then I have only used the 70D for common birds in flight.

As with the 70D and the FZ cameras I used the G80 for some other subjects occasionally, but as with them I was not convinced it produced better results than the cameras I normally used for those subjects.