The MILC Revolution
So what is one-third smaller, lighter, has a fraction of the moving parts and almost twice the resolution of my other cameras? It is one of the newest generation of mirror-less, full-frame, interchangeable lens cameras - MILCs.
I agonized for more than a year about the new, smaller MILCs and was always able to convince myself that this was a passing fad and these 'silly little cameras' could never have professional quality and then Sony released the A7R Mark II with a 42M pixel, high resolution sensor in a weather-sealed body. This became very interesting but Sony had few lenses and only a couple with the professional characteristics that could stand up to meet the optical needs of the high resolution sensor. Then came some Zeiss lenses and a thing called a Metabones adapter that could mount Canon lenses to the little Sony body - very, very interesting. The initial reviews of the camera were outstanding - best image quality of ANY 35mm size sensor on the market, a game changer, but the Metabones was slow to focus and had problems with some of my collection of Canon L-style lenses. Technology to the rescue, Metabones created a firmware update that solved most of the focusing issues and allowed data exchange between the camera body and all of my lenses - deal!
I received the camera and a Zeiss 55mm f/1.8 prime lens in October. It was small, solid feeling, with more gizmo features that I have ever seen on a camera. I found the settings menus very confusing, somewhat illogical, and a little frustrating - for example, the down button increases the ISO and the up button decreases it?? Go figure. Also, the exposure compensation knob requires the operator to move his hand from the shutter release button and turn it with a thumb and forefinger. Awkward, at best.
I did the usual in-house test exposures and was amazed to find the camera practically shoots in the dark with very little digital noise a crazy high ISO levels - interesting. After a week messing with it and trying to get it configured so I could actually shoot with it, I took it into the field. My first shot was a moose about 100m away with the Teton range in the background using the 55mm prime. The moose was a dark spot and the Tetons looked great. (see next photo)
When I got back to process the images I enlarged the image to 100% and was shocked to see the details in the far away moose - looked like I shot it with my 600mm Canon telephoto! I was shocked by the high resolution and the amazing dynamic range of this little camera. (see second photo)
I gradually expanded my experience using the adapter with most of my large Canon lenses and have continued to be amazed at the image quality and the adaptability to the Canon glass. It has worked well in almost all field conditions and has amazing low-light, high ISO capability with almost no digital noise. The focusing is acceptably fast in most lighting conditions although it sometimes "searches" a bit in low light with a big telephoto lens. In wide-angle, landscape shots it is nearly flawless. It fits into a (very large) pocket with the prime lens and otherwise carries well with my large Canon zooms. It provide amazing flexibility having 3 camera bodies in the field - the Sony with a wide-angle for landscapes, the full-frame 5Diii on the 600mm for long wildlife shots, and the 100-400 mm on the very fast 7D for birds and quick wildlife shots.
The Sony is not perfect, however. It is small in my big paws and some of the controls are "difficult" to reach quickly (once I could find them at all.) The menu system is clearly not created by someone with English as their first language and really needs a firmware fix. It shoots bursts at only 5 frames per second and the buffer is not large enough when shooting full 14 bit RAW images so it is not a bird and wildlife camera. The files created are huge (close to 50MB per image) so a 128 GB SD card and lots of hard drive space is needed to store the images. The battery life is bad! I can shoot nearly 1,000 frames with my Canons on a single battery in warm conditions. The small Sony battery is only good for about 150-300 images - especially in a Wyoming winter so carry at least one or two fully charged spare batteries in a warm pocket. Finally, when using traditional dSLR lenses you must get used to the fact that you mount the little camera on the big lens and must mount the lens (or Metabones adapter) to your tripod and not the camera unless you use a small Sony prime.
After drafting this article several months ago, I used the Sony in the deserts of southern California as my primary camera for almost 6 weeks. I soon found a couple of problems. I am pretty careful about lens changes and always keep the camera face down and the lens covered as quickly as possible to avoid internal dust on the the sensor. MILCs have two serious problems causing sensor dust to be a bigger problem than with dSLRs. First, there is no mirror to cover the sensor so it is exposed completely during lens changes. Second, the distance between the camera face and the sensor is very short, making it easy for dust to get to the sensor. In spite of great care changing lenses in the field, the Sony sensor became so dirty as to make it unusable until I could get home again and have full access to a liquid/swab cleaning set up. The Sony has no 'automatic' sensor cleaning and the 'manual' cleaning mode does not seem very efficient. For some reason the blower method of cleaning the sensor which always works for the Canons, was not at all effective with the Sony.
Overall, I am delighted with the Sony A7Rii and its amazing high resolution, good dynamic range, low light and high ISO capability, and its petite size. It will be my go to camera for travel, indoor, and street photography and will stand in well for my beloved 5Diii as a landscape, wide-angle, and panorama camera. It is probably not fast enough for sports/action or wildlife photography but no camera is prefect.
Panasonic Lumix DMZ-FZ1000 review
It shoots very nice UHD (not truly 4k) video. There is some noise in the image but that’s to be expected for this price point.
For the body size and handling, it’s really a nice camera for the right person. I can’t use it for my general shooting for several reasons but if I want a stealthy UHD camera, this one just might fit the bill. At a price below $900, I was stunned just how good it actually was.
Image quality
Photo courtesy of Sava Malachowski, © Sava Malachowski
The IQ (image quality) of the camera for a still is pretty good, though it’s not a higher end Nikon or Canon. Don’t be fooled. In dark areas at low ISO it’s easy to see the noise. A huge zoom lens just won’t have the resolution for stills. For most, they’ll be amazed. But if you’re discerning, you’ll be only “okay” with the shadow performance.
If you click on the image on the right, you can see a small sized sample of the full image. The red box shows the 1:1 sample area of the image on the moose hide. For as good as the image looks in full screen, when you get down to the nitty gritty, you’ll see it’s “okay”. I didn’t have time to do a MTR test or anything, but those don’t translate well into “what does it actually look like” terms.
1:1 quality of moose hide, you can see noise in the image, 1/160, f/5, ISO 125, 63mm
But for video quality you get a very nice image. I was pretty amazed to see it on an iMac display, even though the image was interpolated. It was just clearer than I’ve seen HD. Really, it looked like HD played on a 120Hz TV display. That was the look. The video samples were shot at 60FPS, so perhaps that helped. It really looked like the real thing. I didn’t expect it to be that much better than HD. But if you stack up a 3-chip HD camera with better dynamic range against a limited range, small sensor like this, you might be pressed to tell the difference. Again in the shadows there will be noise. The again, what do you expect for a small form factor single chip camera?
Lens
The aperture goes from about f/3 to ONLY f/8. That’s really miserable for photography. Nature of small sensor cameras. Even though the specs claim f/2.8 to f/11, in the shooting I was testing it with, it only really gave me f/3 to f/8 to work with. That’s a tough one, especially in full daylight shooting.
That zoom and optical stabilizer is awesome. I’d love to have something that goes from 25mm to 400mm and does a real good job on my D800. If I did, I could dump a bunch of other lenses. But I’d need it to be f/2.8 and have it go to f/22. Oh well, I can dream.
Dynamic Range
We had a snow shot with moose and it worked pretty well. But the snow on the mountains was blown out in the video with zebras set to 95%. Again, it’s not a D800 but it’ll blow away your little basic point and shoot. But I think my Sony RX-100 probably still beats it for dynamic range.
View finder
The electronic viewfinder – not bad for a video camera, okay for landscape shooting but poor for sports/action/moving things. When you pan/tilt, you get an image jitter. The swim is very small but the smearing in the image will irritate you if you shoot an optical DSLR. EVF (electronic view finders) aren’t there yet. I worked at a digital night vision company where we went to great efforts to have zero swim, jitter or anything else and this isn’t even close. Then again, those systems were $60,000 and this is $900. You get what you pay for.
The info in the viewfinder for a video camera is very nice. It fits the bill of shooting things where a video camera would get you into trouble. For the price, the image quality is pretty amazing. Is there better dynamic range and such out there? Yes, The GH4 and upwards. But for what this is going for, it really makes UHD accessible.
Controls
The switch to go from zoom to MF – not a fan. 2 rings are more expensive, though. There’s the zoom rocker on the shutter release. Eh, it’s under a finger, so it feels like a little point and shoot zoom for the video camera it’s designed for.
The fully manual video camera mode – thank goodness! Not allowing me to control Auto-ISO ruins other camcorders/DSLRs. Locking down exposure is critical if you want professional-looking images.
The different programmable function buttons are nice for getting what you want. Some of the switch modes like focus control are appreciated. They’re not in ergonomic places like my D800 at all. There are buttons which are appreciated on a video camera but the layout leaves lots to be desired. Like all things, it’s something you get used to.
Autofocus
The autofocus – amazingly fast. I’m not sure what they put in there but it must be a hybrid phase/contrast focus system because it matches my Nikon D800 focus speed quite easily. However, when you need to control focus points, that’s where it falls apart.
Storage
You’ll need lots more storage to use UHD on this camera. Your puny little 320GB drive will be gone in no time shooting with this. Think 2TB drives minimum. Why do I say this? I’m editing my film, Antarctic Tears, which is a feature length film. And it eats up 228GB of my SSD drive. And that’s shot in HD. This camera has almost 4x the resolution. Even a 500GB SSD won’t even come close to supporting a feature length film. 4k/UHD video is what HD was to our computers 10 years ago. Be ready to spend a LOT of money if you want to really work with this.
Other items
Major video shooting issue: This thing has no earphone out. That is one major failing. Why in the world they left this out is beyond me. Perhaps Panasonic is trying to push you into a higher end camera. You might be able to use the AV out and cobble something together. Who knows w/o that cable.
If you don’t have ears on your video camera, you’ll realize only after the shot is over what went wrong. I can pipe audio through my ZoomH4n and listen there, as I can use that as my XLR input, but still. No, this doesn’t have XLR. Of course not.
ND filters for video – buy one. You’ll need one. Or two. For a 3-stop ND, I use this Hoya filter.
The batteries seem to konk out pretty quick, but we were shooting at 10 degrees F with wind chill. Buy more batteries.
You’ll need an UHS-1 SD card for it. UHD video eats up a LOT of card space. I hope you bought a spare hard disk or three. Editing this video – get Rocketstore Thunderbolt enclosure with a SSD drive with a fast computer.
Buy your Panasonic Lumix DMZ-FX1000 here at B&H Photo.
Thank you to Sava Malachowski of Sava Film and Open Range Films for the sample images and video. He had excellent footage to sample and work with in tough conditions, shooting in a Wyoming winter with dark animals and bright snow. There’s not much tougher.
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Getting started in wildlife photography – Part 1
It has been a while since I have written about the technical aspects of photography and I thought it would be good to dive into a discussion about the broad field of wildlife photography. It is a big subject so I'll cover it in two separate postings.
I moved to Jackson, Wyoming last year primarily to be closer to nature and to the amazing wildlife in this part of the country. As a 'nature photographer,' I enjoy all aspects of outdoor photography from landscapes to wildlife to macro-photography, but it is wildlife that really gets me excited. When I write about wildlife photography I really mean WILD-life - not pets, zoo animals, or critters in cages of any sort, but real wildlife out in the open, fending for themselves. I like all sorts of wildlife from large carnivores to birds, grazers, cute little rodents, insects and other invertebrates and each of these families of critters bring different challenges to the photographer.
There are really three 'styles' of wildlife photography and each has its individual rewards. First, and most common, are wildlife portraits. You find a great animal out in a natural setting and are close enough to capture its image close up. Second, there are the beautiful scenic shots (below) with a magnificent animal in the foreground. Third, are the behavioral shots (see blog cover photo)when the critter you have found is doing its thing in an animated and interesting manner. The preparation and gear required to capture each of these styles of images is modified by the physical size of the animal you are shooting.
It goes without saying that a quality digital single-lens reflex (dSLR) camera body is the choice of most wildlife photographers but that doesn't mean that you can't capture great images with a super-zoom or even a point and shoot camera. I remember a few months ago staking out a black bear in Yellowstone for over two hours. I had a 600mm super-telephoto lens mounted on a sturdy tripod ready to go but the bear stayed in the bushes always partially concealed from my view. I packed up ready to move on when the bear took off across the road in front of a car giving the woman in the car a better shot with her phone camera in 20 seconds than I had in hours that cold Yellowstone morning. But good photography requires more than luck - you want to be able to capture good images, reliably, under many conditions. The dSLR is the best choice.
The next issue is the selection of lenses that will give your camera the best image. Wildlife photographers are always looking for the "big glass" but there are two types of 'big' that you must consider. Many times when photographing wildlife you cannot get as close as you would like to be - either because the subject will leave your field of view or the subject is bigger than the photographer and, therefore, demands space. So big lenses are usually part of every wildlife photographer's arsenal but how big is necessary? The answer is, it depends.
Many (most?) times you will want to 'fill the frame' with your subject. So the smaller the subject the closer you must be or the larger your lens must be. Generally, most start with a moderate telephoto lens in the 200-300 mm focal length range. These lenses are small enough and light enough to carry for a significant distance and yet will give a significant 'reach' to your subject. If you are using a crop sensor, rather than a full frame sensor, camera you will see even a smaller angle of view giving the appearance of more magnification. Typically, most APS-C size sensors have a 'crop factor' of 1.5x or 1.6x thus increasing the effective focal length of your lens by the crop factor. Effectively, you get more bang for your buck using a telephoto lens on a crop sensor camera body.
Another way to extend the reach of your lens is by adding a tele-converter (sometimes called a tele-extender) between the lens and camera. These converters increase the effective focal length of the telephoto lens that is attached by a factor of 1.4x or 2x. Doing the math, you can see that a 200 mm telephoto lens on a 1.6x crop sensor and a 1.4x teleconverter give you an effective focal length of 448 mm (200 x 1.6 x 1.4). A 2x tele-converter would increase the effective focal length even more to 640 mm. The increased effective focal length with a converter comes with a significant cost - reduced light to the sensor. A 1.4x converter reduces the maximum aperture of the lens by 1 stop and the 2x converter reduces it by 2 stops. This raises the second requirement for wildlife lenses - they must be 'fast.'
Generally, the best shooting of wildlife is in early morning and late afternoon as the sun is rising or setting. This means a high likelihood of shooting in low light situations. Low light means you will need a large aperture, long shutter speed, or high ISO for proper exposure. (See the Exposure Triangle, 2/21/13, and Where to Start with Exposure, 2/27/13 blog posts.) A long shutter speed is almost never a good option using a telephoto lens because of the chance of image blur due to 'camera shake' or movement of the subject. The rule of thumb is that the shutter speed should equal or be faster than 1 / effective focal length. So your 200mm lens on a crop sensor camera with a 1.4x converter means your slowest shutter speed should be 1/640 seconds or more practically, 1/1000th second. That is fast enough to eliminate blur from camera shake and to freeze (slow) movement of your subject but how do you get enough light to the sensor? The answer is a large aperture. So the second 'big' in wildlife lenses is a large diameter aperture - ideally f/4 or larger. The large aperture allows more light to reach the sensor in the time the shutter is open. Unfortunately, a large aperture is the major cost of a lens - more glass equals more money.
We will address the last of the exposure issues and other ways to improve your wildlife photography in the next posting. Until then happy shooting.