Lovely pictures!
I am a bit of a camera geek, I started taking pictures in about 1961 and have tried lots of cameras. In the digital range I currently have a CanonEOS Ds Mk2, Eos 7D, Nikon D3x, D700, Sony A7RII, Leica M, M9 and M8.2, Leica R8 with DMR, Fuji X-Pro1, 3 Olympus OMD-E1mk2, OMD-E5 and OMD-E1 plus a Panasonic I forget the type number.
I have a lot of lenses.
That's a lot of cameras.
My eyes aren't as good as they were, with film cameras I always preferred a matt focusing screen to one with focusing aids, particularly since I used mainly fast lenses and the focusing aids usually "look" through a f5.6 window so they don't go dark with most lenses. Cameras with changeable focussing screens were much preferred for me then.
Things are different now. I don't think that changeable screens are a feature on must digital cameras.
In compensation, AF has gotten much better. CDAF is very precise. No micro focus adjustments problems that DSLRs had. I mostly use manual focus on closeups. With focus peaking and image magnification, I am much more confident that the subject is in focus now than I ever was when I used a DSLR.
I find focus peaking to be quite useful on the Sony, though on all the mirrorless cameras the focusing is done at taking aperture afaik so not as precise as an SLR or rangefinder.
I have no experience with focus peaking on Sony cameras. I have tried out Olympus m43 cameras in the past and found their focus peaking implementation to be unsatisfactory. I have not checked again recently.
I just tried focus peaking on my Panasonic G7 and Olympus 60mm macro lens. Spinning the aperture dial makes no difference in what focus peaking shows in the viewfinder. You may be referring to using adapted lenses. If so, it might be a question of whether you focus before stopping down or after.
I've checked the accuracy on our Panasonic cameras many times and always found it to be highly accurate.
I lost the will to live setting up the buttons on the Olympus, but have to admit that once done it makes it nicer to use than any others apart from Leica.
You seemed to have recovered.
Have you tried focus stacking software? I like macro and thought I would like to use it but haven't. It would be quite a magic composite photograph.
We don't use focus stacking for several reasons. It is not a good tool when the subject moves (breeze moving a flower or an insect moving on a flower.) With the 60mm lenses we use, 1:1 magnification requires a working distance of 6-7 inches from the sensor. From the front of the lens hood, that is 3-4 inches. Way too close for our purposes. 12-20 working distance is right for us and we don't need focus stacking to get enough depth of field. We crop as needed on our PCs.
Finally, I often admire the precision of well done focus stacked images. However, they frequently have a slightly sterile look. (Closeup photos taken with flash are far worse. Muddy backgrounds and the subject's colors seem off and dull.)
The m43 sensors have higher pixel density than ~24 Mpixel APS-C sensors. That translates to more pixels on the subject at the same optical magnification. There are no FFC cameras that have pixel densities even close to that of our m43 sensors. That gives us more freedom to crop.
PS I am loving your smugmug page!
Thanks. The flowers and insects supply the art and we supply the craft needed to capture their beauty.
I am always way behind in getting photo galleries on line. What you see on SmugMug is a small fraction of what we have photographed.
I have tapered off on posting to Flickr but our photostream there gives a collection of our activity over the years.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bill_lesley_photos/
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