Panasonic bracketing quirks

I've been playing with bracketing on my GX9 (I assume it's similar on other recent Panasonic cameras). Does anyone else find it odd how Panasonic implements some of these features?

One change from my older GX7 is that focus bracketing options have been separated from drive mode options. I guess the advantage is that it allows bracketing to be used in conjunction with drive modes like self timer, but for me it also brings some strange and unintuitive quirks (beyond the waste of a function button).

It surprised me that burst speed affects bracketing, so if I'm using low speed it'll also bracket at 2fps speed. I can't think of any circumstances where slower shooting would be desirable while bracketing. Maybe I'm missing something, but it just makes it more likely that movement during the sequence will ruin the HDR or focus stacked shot.

Another thing that doesn't make sense to me is that exposure bracketing will adjust ISO between shots if auto-ISO is enabled. I'll resist the urge to nitpicking about whether ISO should even be considered an exposure setting, but it obviously isn't what's wanted when bracketing for HDR. Fuji's implementation makes more sense to me - exposure bracketing always changes shutter speed regardless of other settings.

That caught me out a few times when taking indoor HDR shots like this:

In practice this can mean having to adjust three different settings, spread across three different screens, before I can take the shot. It's not a big deal -- as a solution I've set one of the custom modes to sensible bracketing settings -- but I do find it hard to understand Panasonic's thinking.

Panasonic's focus bracketing is one of the most interesting new (to me) features found on the GX9, unfortunately it currently isn't as useful as it could be.

I sometimes create stacked images hand held by moving the camera backwards and forwards as I shoot, using flash to freeze movement. Panasonic focus bracketing doesn't provide an alternative to that method because it doesn't work with flash.

I think that's a disappointing and unnecessary limitation. Olympus bracketing can use flash despite electronic shutter limiting sync to 1/20s. Panasonic use the mechanical shutter when bracketing, so there's no reason it couldn't fire the flash at its full sync speed.

The GX9 doesn't even make it obvious that this won't work, e.g. by greying out the focus bracketing option when a flash is attached. I think this caused some confusion early on, with some people who'd played with the camera assuming that bracketing with flash was possible.

One quirk/bug that caught me out at first is that using back button AF lock causes focus bracketing to malfunction.

I'd been using the GX9 in AF-C, then holding down AF lock when I wanted to fix focus, or focus and recompose without moving the AF point. If I try to use focus bracketing while locking AF, the first shot in the sequence will be in focus, but for each subsequent shot it seems to reset the lens to its minimum focus distance.

For example, here's the first shot in a bracketed group, focus locked on the spout:

and here's how all the others turned out:

Those complaints aside, I do think that this is a nifty feature that I'll find useful in some circumstances.

Here's a more successful test, stacked from 4 focus bracketed shots to capture both the rocks in the foreground and the boat in the background:

Keit ll wrote:

Where exactly can the focus bracketing mode be setup on the GX9?

‘Rec’ menu

Keit ll wrote:

jrsforums wrote:

Keit ll wrote:

Where exactly can the focus bracketing mode be setup on the GX9?

‘Rec’ menu

Thanks , I just found it under a sub-division of Bracketing, I was looking at the Post-focus section.

Suggest you add it to ‘My Menu’ section