Toby Keller - Night Photography Blog

Panasonic GF1 - Initial Thoughts

I just went to the camera store to look around, I promise! Instead, I walked out with a new camera. I don’t make a habit of buying cameras this way, but the Panasonic GF1 was just too much fun to pass up.

GF1, 20mm pancake at f/1.7, ISO 100

I’ve wanted a high quality compact camera to supplement my D300 for ages now (I know, I know, so has everyone). I bought a Panasonic LX3 last year, and though it is by far the best compact I’ve owned, it felt lacking somehow… something intangible was missing. The GF1 seems to come a lot closer to fulfilling that ideal.

GF1, 20mm pancake at f/1.7, ISO 800

Image quality-wise, the LX3 and the GF1 are pretty close. The GF1 is about a stop better at high ISOs - 1600 looks a lot like the LX3 at 800. The character of the noise and artefacts is very similar between the two.

GF1, 20mm pancake at f/1.7, ISO 800

So why do I prefer the GF1? A couple reasons, and oddly enough one of the major ones is purely tactile. The larger GF1 fits my hand better, and has a satisfying heft to it. To focus the lens manually, you use a ring around the lens like god intended, rather than clicking around on a set of buttons. The GF1 makes a nice mechanical “click” when you trigger the shutter. It’s not loud, certainly a lot quieter than my D300, but it’s there and it’s real. It feels like a camera should. Somehow the little electronic click from the LX3 didn’t feel right. Of course, a near-silent shutter can be a good thing in many situations, and many photographers prefer it, but not me. It’s illogical, but somehow important.

GF1, 20mm pancake at f/1.7, ISO 200

The other reason has to do with depth of field. Because of its wee sensor, the LX3 has an abundance of it - too much, in many situations. This is great for street photography - I will still grab the LX3 for candid street shooting. But for portraits and the kind of spontaneous snapshots I like to take, I prefer a nice shallow depth of field to lead the eye and accentuate the subject. The GF1s larger 4/3ds sensor, combined with the 20mm f/1.7 lens, creates a much shallower plane of focus when shooting wide open.

GF1, 20mm pancake at f/1.7, ISO 800

The GF1 is a very capable and very fun camera. I find it very hard to put down, and to Panasonic’s credit, about the only thing I would change if I could would be to put a full-frame 24x36 sensor in it! Of course, this would totally change both the form factor and the price, but really the only things I am left wanting are inherent in larger sensors - even shallower DOF and less high ISO noise. But these are really minor quibbles and have to do with the 4/3ds format, rather than the camera itself.

GF1, 20mm pancake at f/1.7, ISO 100

Overall, this is one impulse buy I’m happy to have made!

GF1, 20mm pancake at f/1.7, ISO 400

Links to my posts on the LX3:

Panasonic LX3 Street Photography

Panasonic LX3 Review

New Camera: Panasonic LX3

Panasonic LX3 Street Shots

Part of the reason I bought the LX3 was to have a good compact camera for street shooting. I've been using a Canonet and an Olympus XA for those duties, but I'm sick of spending hours scanning 35mm film. So how did the Panasonic stack up?

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no great street photographer. I do enjoy it though, and the LX3 makes it even more enjoyable. For one, it's almost totally silent once you turn off the idiot beeping. It's also easy to hold it down at near-waist level, thanks to a wide viewing angle LCD. And it has a really cool function that I didn't expect - in manual focus mode, it has a little yellow bar on the distance scale to show you the range of focus, not just the point you've set it at! In other words, as you zoom in or open the aperture, you'll see the yellow DOF indicator shrink, telling you you're going to have shallower depth of field. This is really cool - it makes it super easy to set the hyperfocal distance. Just rack the focus in until infinity is no longer within the yellow bar, then move it back in a bit.

The way I've been shooting, none of the people on the street have even been aware I was taking pictures. This is quite novel after years of using only bulky DSLRs... I think Henri Cartier-Bresson would have loved this thing!

Labels: lx3, street

Panasonic LX3 Review

Ok, I've spent a day with the LX3, and have a few example photos to share. Let me say up front that I am very happy with the results - with a couple caveats. All in all, the LX3 is light years beyond the last compact cameras I've used (waaaay back in '05). Also, I've only shot jpeg so far, as I don't feel like installing the RAW software that came with the LX3, and Adobe doesn't yet support the LX3 RAW files. On to the good stuff:

I took the camera out to the beach for a sunset walkabout. It wasn't a very strenuous test - light was good, no need for high ISOs, etc. But I was able to get a sense of the handling and responsiveness of the camera after taking about 100 shots. I bought a Sandisk 4GB SDHC card at Costco for 17.99 (after some sort of discount at the register), as I had already filled up the meager internal memory playing around.

I was impressed by the LX3's dynamic range. It didn't seem that far off from my D70 and D300 DSLRs - not as good, obviously, but not night-and-day, either. The image above is a .jpg straight out of the camera, no adjustments at all. You can see some purple flare in the bottom left corner, and the area around the sun is blown out. But overall, the dynamic range is very good, and far beyond that of any compacts I've used to date.

Here's a photo taken using the "Dynamic B&W" film mode. Very nice even tonal gradation in the sky, and good tonal range within the image. No detail is lost in the rocks in the foreground, and at the same time there is good detail in the shrubs beneath the deck. This photo also is an unaltered .jpg from the camera, with the exception of a platinum tone added in Lightroom.

One of the benefits of a compact camera is good native macro capability. I have a 55mm macro lens for my D300, but it's a bit of a hassle to dig it out every time I want to do a quick detail shot. It's not a lens I bring with me very often, so it doesn't get used much. The LX3 at 24mm can focus just a couple centimeters in front of the lens, yielding amazingly sharp and detailed close-ups like the one above of my wife's eye. The image is a 100% crop from a shot at ISO 100, f/5.6 at 24mm.

This shot is the nearest thing I have to an illustration of how shallow the DOF gets at 60mm f/2.8. Not very, I'm afraid, compared to a larger-sensor DSLR, but still aesthetically pleasing, I think.

Finally, the image above is a crop from a shot at ISO 800 at f/2.8. It is about 1/4 of the total image, just to give a sense of what the noise looks like. I was very impressed - I was prepared for everything over ISO 400 to be unusable, but it turns out ISO 800 looks just fine for my purposes. I'm not intending to print these large, so I don't see it even being a factor in a printed image, really. Below is a 100% crop showing a shadow area - pretty much the worst case scenario in this image:

So, what's not to like about the camera? Mainly, I'm trying to get used to the ergonomics. It's a really small camera! My D300 fits my hand like an extension of my body. The LX3 crams too many controls into too small a place. That's not really its fault, though - that would be the same for any compact. Besides the size, I had some issues with the "Dynamic" and "Vibrant" film styles - these tend to render skin tones with too much red/orange to them. People just look unnatural with these modes. It's much better in "Standard" mode, but still, the color rendition is nowhere near as good as my D300. I can live with that, though, as I plan to shoot mostly B&W with this camera. The "Dynamic B&W" mode is quite nice, giving good contrast while preserving a wide tonal range.

Other than those two minor points, I'm a pretty satisfied customer... I think the LX3 will work out just fine for my purposes, and I can give it a solid recommendation for those looking to supplement a DSLR or for anyone who just wants a good solid compact camera.

Labels: lx3, review

New camera - Panasonic LX3

The UPS man just brought me a new toy: the Panasonic Lumix LX3 compact digital camera. Now, I'm primarily a landscape shooter, and happily use my D300 for that. In fact it's not even possible to take the sort of night shots I specialize in using my new toy. So why get it? Well, there's a few reasons. One, I enjoy carrying a camera with me daily just in case I come across something worth shooting. I ride a motorcycle, and have wanted a small camera to bring on riding trips - the D300 takes up almost my entire tank bag. I've wanted to rig up a bracket that I could use to attach the camera to the bike to take pictures while riding - of myself and of the scenery. This is way easier with a compact camera than a bulky DSLR (and probably safer too). Recently, my wife Jade and I got back from our honeymoon in Costa Rica. I brought along a "basic" kit of the D300 and three lenses. It took up the better part of half my backpack, and was a constant source of apprehension whenever I had to leave it somewhere. All my gear is insured, but I still didn't want to lose any of the photos I had taken. Not to mention, the D300 is no pocket camera. It is a heavy beast, and requires a certain level of commitment to haul it around all the time.

So I was hankering for something small and light that would still produce good images. I wanted something with a bright wide angle lens - most of my photos are shot as wide as I can get. I also didn't want anything made of flimsy plastic - I've been spoiled silly by the tank that is the D300 (not to mention all my film cameras), and "feel" has always been important to me when it comes to my tools.

Enter the Panasonic LX3. I read about it a couple months ago, and from the specs it sounded like it would do the trick. Solid metal body, bright (f/2!) wide lens, and touting very high quality images for a compact. I waited around to read the first reviews, which seemed rather positive... then J&R camera offered a $100 discount for pre-orders, so I went ahead and ordered mine.

Well, as I just received it, I haven't been able to test it out yet, but it definitely feels like a quality tool. There's a good heft to it, thanks to the metal body. It's really really small, too - smaller than I thought. It makes a Leica rangefinder seem enormous in comparison. I'll be doing some shooting later today, and I'll report back with my impressions of image quality. So far, it seems like exactly what I wanted!

Nikon FE2 and a trip to Santa Cruz

It was off to Santa Cruz the other weekend, en route to my good friend's wedding reception in Hollister. A good time was had by all, and despite a 4 foot drop onto the pavement, my FE2 was reliably clicking along the whole time.

Labels: fe2, film, hp5

D300 Shadow Detail test

So, we've all been in the situation where the subject you want to shoot is positioned directly between you and the sun. It's a challenge to get a good image in such a scenario, especially if you don't have (or don't want to use) fill flash.

Here's what your typical camera metering might produce in a strongly backlit scene:

The subject, in this case a tall leafy plant, is extremely underexposed. The image is more or less worthless. Without fill flash, the best in-camera solution would be to meter without the sun/sky in the shot, use AE lock and re-take the shot. However, this will tend to over-expose the sky and may flare badly, as it did here:

So, in-camera fixes aren't cutting it. But I know from my D70 days that trying to restore detail in an extremely underexposed shot like the first one tends to result in huge amounts of ugly noise and very poor color rendition. Detail in such deep shadow areas is just not there to recover.

Enter the D300. I was impressed with the D300's dynamic range before, but after today I'm just amazed...

This is the same shot as the first one, but with Lightroom/ACR's "Fill light" slider all the way to the right ('99')! The detail and colors are amazing, given the severity of the underexposure. There is noise, of course, but it's very even and doesn't 'block up' in the shadow transitions like the D70 (and other previous generation Nikons) did. Overall I'd be comfortable making an 8x10 print of the result.

Here are two 100% crops of an identical area of the photo, before and after applying the Fill light command:

I'm just blown away by the level of detail preserved in what appeared to be solid black shadow. I wouldn't hesitate to use this technique in a professional shoot, if there was no way to use fill flash. More importantly, my landscape images will benefit from the increased dynamic range, as I can 'dodge' detail back in to areas that fell in deep shadow.

For those interested, both images were shot with a Tokina 12-24mm lens at f/8, ISO 200. They were taken in 14-bit compressed (lossy) RAW format and converted using Lightroom and saved for web in Photoshop CS3.

Labels: d300