New kit - Collecting evidence Part 2 - flowers etc

 The third of the three new pieces of kit I was thinking about was a micro four thirds Panasonic Leica 50-200. In this post I said that "For flowers etc I need to do some practical comparisons between the 60mm macro and the 45-175." 

Three weeks ago I photographed 9 flowers hand-held in our garden using a Panasonic 45-175 on a G9, with and without a Canon 500D close-up lens depending on the size of the subject, and with an Olympus 60mm macro on a Panasonic G9. 

I used aperture bracketing. With the Olympus 60mm macro this gave me a set of 7 shots for each shutter press. With the 45-175 each aperture bracket set contained 5 shots.

For each subject I selected the image that appealed to me most from each camera and processed the selected images from raw using my then current flower workflow of Lightroom followed by Topaz DeNoise AI.

For each subject I selected the image that I liked best. This turned out to be four captured with the 45-175 and five captured with the 60mm macro. (They are in this album at Flickr.)

It is possible that the 50-200 would render colours, textures and out of focus areas better than either the 60mm macro or the 45-175, but I obviously could not test this. What I did expect to see was a difference in the way backgrounds were rendered, with the longer focal lengths I typically use with the 45-175 throwing the backgrounds more out of focus, but looking at the test shots nothing of that sort jumped out at me.

Basically, in this test I did not see any evidence of a particular advantage of using a telezoom with/without a close-up lens compared to the macro lens. It looked like any significant benefit of a 50-200 would have to come from better rendering of colours, textures and out of focus areas. But about that I had no evidence to go on.

That was for stills. For focus stacking the 50-200 might be pretty much as good as the 60mm macro, although a lot of the time it would be using a slightly smaller aperture than the f/2.8 that I use with the 60mm macro for focus stacking, and so backgrounds would be slightly less out of focus than with the 60mm macro (possibly counteracted by the effect of using a long focal length) and in some cases shutter speed would be slightly slower or ISO slightly higher.

What was definitely the case was that at 655 grams the 50-200 is (to me) significantly heavier than the 60mm macro at 186 grams.  It is also expensive, at almost £1,500.

To my mind the potential benefits are too much in doubt to outweigh the definite disadvantages, especially as I have no particular problems I need/want to solve with the Olympus 60mm macro. In fact, I rather like using it and am content with the image quality I get from it. I will therefore not be pursuing the option of a Panasonic Leica 50-200.

So for now, I have no additional hardware under consideration.