Panasonic G9 - 2018 onwards

I liked the G9 right from the outset. It almost instantly became my favoured camera for botanical scenes, used with the Olympus 60mm macro. A development that surprised me was that I quickly found myself using post focus for stacking almost all the time. The G9 can use post focus with 6K video, which produces 18 megapixel images rather than the 8 megapixel 4K images produced by the G80 and FZ330. Also, the rendition of colours, textures and detail seemed very pleasing. (This is discussed in more detail in a later post.)

I have not been using the G9 long, and with it being winter there have not been a lot of botanical subjects to photograph. Nonetheless I have been very pleased with the results I have been getting. I am also less troubled than I was by stacking imperfections. I think this is partly because I have gained enough experience with Helicon Focus (which has been updated in a couple of useful ways) to know how to work around some of the problems. Partly however I think it is that I have accepted that there will be imperfections but I still often prefer slightly flawed stacks to what I could achieve with single images, which have different sorts of imperfections, particularly to do with the balance between focus coverage for the subject and nice renditions of backgrounds, but also to do with noise and/or sharpness in poor light.