DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY - Walking with the Lumix...

Looks like I feel I want to see how my skills and appreciation for different cameras play now that I have much more experience with photography. This time it's my Panasonic's Lumix FZ20's turn. No Street Life Photography, just went for a walk, and photographed some trees, landscape, etc.

 

A couple of thoughts:

 

• I like the      weight of the camera, and the fact that it's like carrying my evolt with      two lenses all rolled into one. I      think I would even prefer the tinier FZ5 actually- though that camera      doesn't have manual focusing. I am afraid in some shots it will fail      because of that.
• I had to manual      focus some shots like very distant mountains, etc. That I find fine, but the resolution of      the LCD/EVF on the FZ20 doesn't seem high enough resolution to make this      task pleasant and accurate.
• It's nice to      know the FZ20 has no shutter lag once you have pre-focused
• I found myself      digging to the menus to change contrast, B&W to color and back, modes,      and saturation. I found the digging through the menus annoying though at      least Panasonic makes the menus respond in real-time to any presses, and      you can actually jump pages of the menus by using the telephoto zoom      in/out controls when in menu mode.
• I definitively      didn't venture outside ISO 80. This camera is noisy at ISO's greater than      100.
• There doesn't      seem to be a huge advantage in capturing in TIFF vs JPEG, since a lot of      the noise artifacts are the same, not a result of the compression of the      format. The FZ20 doesn't have raw mode.
• I found the      continuous shooting mode (3fps) helpful to get some shots in focus.
• Like the      shooting with the F710, now that I look at the photos in my computer, I      did a lot of crooked shots… It's like I need to get used to the camera I      am going to use…
• I found the      shutter speed variations along with apertures a bit weird, non-intuitive      and in 2-3 cases annoying (but that's the less of the cases, and it's just      a matter of getting used to the constraints, coming from the e-volt).

 

As always, comment & critiques always welcome. The gallery is here.