Most of the images posted here so far have come from my Olympus E-1 digital dinosaur – a camera that is comfortably out-resolved by even the cheapest mobile phone nowadays, but which still rates as the favourite digital camera that I’ve owned to-date. However, sometimes I have to agree it’s not the right tool for the job – besides only having 5MP, it’s quite bulky and relatively slow (focusing and processing). So you have to give in to progress I guess….
The only eagle flying at Crystal Palace today
Even though it looks old, the other camera I use frequently is very modern under its faux-retro exterior – a PanaLeica LX100/D Lux Typ 109 (essentially interchangeable cameras unless you’re a Leica fan who can’t accept that you’ve basically bought a Panasonic – like me 🙂 ).
Today I took it with me when I accompanied my son to see local team Crystal Palace FC humiliated by Hull City. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and despite some appalling refereeing decisions, The Eagles (CPFC) didn’t really seem to be as hungry to win as the visitors.
Still, I thought it might be a good opportunity to experiment with the 4K video function, which I’ve never used before – and the results didn’t come out too bad, all things considered – and certainly better than previous outings with other compact cameras tying to either use single shot or continuous tracking.
It took me a while to work out how to extract photos from the video afterwards (especially as I didn’t resort to the ridiculously over-complicated manual that came with the camera) but I got there in the end – and as long as you don’t intend to view the images at larger sizes they come out reasonably well. The ones posted here are all significant crops (probably about one third of the original 8MP JPEG image that the camera extracted from the video file) because, let’s face it, a lens which reaches 75mm (moderate telephoto) at most isn’t exactly the obvious choice for a football match.
If you look too closely there are JPEG artefacts galore, but used correctly I think the 4K Photo mode could be quite useful on occasion – and I suspect it comes into its own when using cameras with more flexible lenses such as the FZ1000/V Lux 114 – if you don’t have to crop, the images will turn out pretty well.
So the next question I’m wondering about is…..is this still photography?
The Photographer's Block 