This article features a small selection of jumping spider macro images that were captured handheld using in-camera focus stacking (HHFS) with my E-M1X, an M.Zuiko 90 mm f/3.5 PRO IS macro lens, and an M.Zuiko MC-20 teleconverter.

I’m still in the early stages of my learning curve with this lens. These jumping spider macro photographs should definitely be viewed from a test image perspective. All of the photographs in this article are full frame captures without any cropping. They were resized to 1200 pixels on the width for website use.

As regular readers know, I enjoy pushing myself and my camera gear, and this was certainly true for the test images in this article. To that end, all of the featured photographs were captured with the assistance of an M.Zuiko MC-20 teleconverter. This created some extra challenge when using handheld in-camera focus stacking as the focal length used was 180 mm, or an equivalent field of view of 360 mm. Any hand/body movements on my part would have been amplified by the increased focal length and the close focusing distance.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

I don’t know the exact physical size of the orange and white jumping spider in these images… but it was tiny… likely measuring only a few millimetres in length.

It was sitting on the top of a small garden solar light when it caught a very small fly. As it moved around trying to subdue its catch I had to adjust my shooting angle as best I could from my sitting position on my rear deck. Patience was also needed as there were a few occasions when I had to wait for the spider to move back into a more appropriate shooting angle.

I’m still experimenting with my in-camera focus stacking settings for the M.Zuiko 90 mm f/3.5 PRO IS macro lens. Rather than take a chance on using completely new HHFS settings, I reverted back to my standard settings of 10 stacked photographs with a focus differential of 4 for these photographs.

One of the challenges when using the M.Zuiko MC-20 teleconverter for these photographs was losing two stops of light, and a couple of stops of Sync-IS performance. This resulted in me capturing these images at ISO-6400, with a shutter speed of 1/800, and an aperture of either f/14 or f/16. As could be expected, these settings had a negative impact on the quality of the out-of-camera jpegs.

I used a single, small auto-focus point for all of the images in this article.

As I continue to experiment with the M.Zuiko 90 mm PRO IS macro lens I’ll hopefully become more proficient with it. In my initial article about this lens, I mentioned that I was having some difficulty using the in-camera focus stacking function on a handheld basis. Continued experimentation has proven that this issue was due to operator error/technique on my part.

Although it is still early in my experimentation, the M.Zuiko 90 mm f/3.5 PRO IS has already enabled me to create images that I could not have captured with our M.Zuiko 60 mm f/2.8 macro lens.

While capturing these jumping spider macro images I felt a strong sense of creative adventure. This bodes well for the future.

Technical Note

Photographs were captured handheld with the camera equipment and technology noted in the EXIF data. All images were created from out-of-camera jpegs files using my standard process in post. This is the 1,386 article published on this website since its original inception in 2015.

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