Just hangin around
I couldn't help it. It had to be done. I won't say it was easy making the break, and I know it's very early days, but the signs are that this new relationship is going to be a fruitful and happy one.
It's not that we fell out, or anything, but after a while it got harder to ignore the little infelicities - the little age spots (I could ignore the ones off to the side, but the bright one in the centre of the picture... no), the resolution, once good, but now a 90-lb weakling amid the new breed.
Don't get me wrong, it's still got a lot going for it. Great lens - 10x optical zoom with stabiliser - sharp focus, reasonably controllable... I wonder if you can put digital cameras out to stud. That's it over there, by the way, reflected in the userpic: my trusty Olympus 2100UZ.
I would happily have stayed in the family, but for some reason they seem to have dropped the stabiliser, or at least, don't mention it in their literature any more. No no no.
So it was off to Panasonic. Another great lens (Leica, 12x optical zoom, stabilised), lots of pixels, lots of bells and whistles. I'm not convinced it needs to go ssh-click!, but some geek somewhere is proud of that, I'm sure.
Anyway, the rain stopped and the sky got bright enough for me to venture into the garden and take a few quick snaps of the grapevine and some of the wildlife that lives in it. Like the little chap to our left, who was patiently swinging and bobbing around in the breeze waiting for something to drop in for dinner. Don't click on it if you get spooked by spiders, by the way.
What really impressed me is that I made these shots handheld, from a distance of four or five feet, with a fairly stiff breeze moving everything around.
Pretty good first impression. All other things aside, what Panasonic has truly got "right" in this camera is something that almost all digital camera makers have got wrong up to now. The lens barrel has two rings on it. One works the zoom, the other is the manual focus. If you've ever tried to focus or zoom-frame a shot using the crude thumb-switch and servo arrangement that most cameras have these days, you'll know why this is such a great idea.
I'm itching to see how it does with long exposures in low light, because I really want to be able to do more like this one.
That was an exposure of something like two minutes, with the camera stopped right down and an ND filter and loaded with ISO 25 slide film. The bit of good fortune was a small herd of kids who wandered into shot, stood still on four of the rocks for 20-30 seconds, then wandered off again.
We'll see...