Category: Aaron Linsdau

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

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.

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.

There was a large propane gas explosion in Jackson Hole, WY today. Here are some pictures showing the huge smoke plume in from Amerigas on Gregory Lane and High School Road. All businesses around the area have been evacuated, including Bell Fitness and Smith Food King.

Please email me if you want to use the full resolution images in your news article. These are only cropped down samples.

All of these photos are © 2014 Aaron Linsdau.

This weekend the Teton Photography Group is hosting their 3rd symposium, Post Processing for Digital Photography in the Black Box theater at the Art Center in Jackson Hole.

If you have taken many photographs but aren’t sure how to process them to get them to the next level, this is the event to attend.

Many photographers take shots and then just email/print/post them as is and they receive a tepid response. Why is this? Because they aren’t sure what their final image was going to look like when they took the shot. Visualization of what the final product is going to look like is of the utmost importance when photographing. Otherwise you end up with shots looking like they were taken in a parking lot.

You will be motivated and excited by the speakers, as all of us have experience in how to make images better. But it’s not about our ability to make images better, it’s about us teaching you how to make YOUR shots better. All of the speakers are entertaining, educational and, most importantly, accessible. We do our best to answer questions and to help guide you through the labyrinth of photo editing.

This symposium will cover some shooting and composition with respect to post processing, that is, what you do after you click the shutter. How do you use Lightroom, what’s the best way to edit your shots, and more advanced techniques for:

• Panorama multi-image shooting
• HDR (high dynamic range) images
• Focus stacking
• Black and white processing

These symposiums have been very well received because attendees get a lot of education for their time and the nominal cost. If you have ever wanted to learn the basics of how to make your photographs look better, this is the event to attend.

Click here for the symposium link and become a better photographer today.

 

I had a client come to be and ask about photographing some paintings. He wanted to have them shot with enough resolution to make reproductions of them for sale. Wonderful! I was glad he called because it’s not as easy to photograph a painting as one might imagine.

As you can see below, the shot is terribly washed out on the left hand side. What happened?

Glare from the flash caught the surface of the painting and bounced into the camera, creating a badly washed out looking left side. What about the right side? I had the polarizers from the lamps set to the proper orientation, so it looks fine.

You’re asking – wait a minute..did he polarize the flashes? Yes, in order to eliminate glare off the painting, I needed to polarize the light coming from my flashes. This way, I could align the light in such a manner as to nearly eliminate all the glare coming off the painting even before the light hit my camera lens. But, to get the correct effect, the lens also happens to have a second polarizer on it. And you need to use a polarizer alignment card to check the polarization to make sure it is correct.

Confused yet?

There’s a lot to photographing products and artwork because if done improperly, these problems will show up:

• Glare
• White balance
• Color calibration
• Lens distortion
• Orientation/perspective distortion

All of these problems will ruin your attempted reproduction. In order to photograph flat artwork properly, you’ll need the following tools beyond the usual photo tools:

• Polarizer panel for each light source
• Diffuser for polarized light source panels
• Polarization angle detector
• Polarizer for camera lens
• Color calibration reference card for printing
• Distortion profile for your lens
• Light stands
• Powerful strobes
• Light meter with remote trigger or flash sense

It takes quite a bit of equipment and even more know-how to photograph flat art properly. Even if you’re able to get away from the glare, the color calibration is a major deal. If your colors are incorrect, the client is going to be very unhappy. You can’t just put your camera on flash white balance and assume it’ll all work. Polarizers subtly shift color (especially in sunlight),  plus the color dye balance of your camera never matches the flashes. And the color balance of your flashes is never correct.

No matter how much effort you put into trying to color balance your lights, you’ll never get 100% of the way there. The only way is to have and use a color reference card, then know how to calibrate the final image so it looks correct.

Also, using hot lamps (light bulbs) is problematic for 2 reasons. They’re easier to align for polarization, true. But you have to have a LOT of light power to expose the image properly. That means your very expensive/nice painting is boiling under quartz halogen lamps.

Or you have to have a very long exposure. That means the rest of the lights in the room have to be extinguished. But wait, you’re in your gallery, so you can’t shoot this in the dark. So you need even more and more powerful lamps.

Then notice that the blues in your image are too dark because you’re using a tungsten/halogen light source. So you adjust the white balance but notice that there’s blue noise in your image.

It’s important that the light is uniform across the image as well. Otherwise there will be gradients of light that aren’t in the original piece. This makes a BIG difference. In order to measure the light uniformity, you’ll need to use a light meter (I use Sekonic-L608C) to check the uniformity across the painting. And you’ll need a way to remote trigger your strobes from the light meter while doing this as well. If the painting is brighter on one side or spot than the other, you’ll not be happy with the reproduction.

You care about getting the image correct, right? The above is the basics of what you have to consider, own and understand.

Or, you can just hire me and I’ll get you the images without the headaches and $1000′s in gear you’ll have to have to make this work correctly.

Note – Edge intentionally left on images