Flowers and macro

While at mum and dad's on the weekend I tried out the new camera while walking around mum's garden. I had the 14-140 mm lens on and tried that out to see if it would let me take half decent macro photos. The following is at 140 mm with the distance to th flower at about the minimum focusing distance of 30 cm. 

I had a play around with another couple of flowers, experimenting with aperture, distance and whatever else I could come up with. The colours all seem to be nicely similar to what I saw and all are jpeg's straight from the camera. 

Then I started to play with the Post Focus mode on the camera. Essentially, the camera takes a short (~2 sec) 4K video where the focal plane is adjusted from the nearest to the most distant point in the field of view. Then while viewing the image on the camera touch screen you can choose which part of the image you want to be in focus simply by touching it and then save it as a 8MP jpeg image. Here is a link to Panasonic's explanation page including some video :- http://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/lumix/feature/post_focus.html

For this I experimented on one of mum's orchids. Here is a link to the video file it produced :- http://youtu.be/-NKwkG3dFRk

And following are four photos extracted from the video on the camera. 

Since the 4K video is a standard .mp4 format you can also extract individual frames as 8 MP images on a computer using most video editing software (I.e. IMovie). If you want to get fancy you can combine several of these frames together using focus stacking software to produce an image with a much larger depth of field but still retain the blurred background. I haven't graduated to this yet but I'll have to give it a go sooner or later. I hand held the camera for the above shots but if you want to do this properly you would set the camera up on a tripod or you can align the images afterwards in software before stacking them. Overall I'm quite happy with the performance of the camera for this sort of thing as I don't often do proper macros and wild flowers would be the most likely time I would take these sort of shots. 

Note :- No flowers were harmed while taking these photos. Also, I only know one is an orchid as mum told me that, the rest I have no idea what they are. :)