Had the opportunity to take a few days off and travel to the mountains of New Mexico near the town of Silver City. Stayed in a cabin in the woods with and old friend of ours from St Thomas, USVI… Reminds me of an old joke. “To the woods, to the woods!” “Anywhere but the woods!!” “ANYWHERE???” “To the woods….”
But I digress I did bring some cameras with me to play with.
Probably the best all around camera for travel and convenience from Panasonic is the Lumix FZ1000. I like if for it’s fast glass, range of 25-400mm with a digital zoom option to take it to 1600mm and super light weight about two and a half pounds. Here are a couple photos from the FZ near the cabin.
Nature’s camo! If I hadn’t had the camera set to a shallow Depth of Field that deer would be almost invisible.
These woodpecker were flitting from tree to tree in search of their next snack. Having a high perch on an upper deck made photographing them relatively easy. The 400mm reach of the lens didn’t hurt either.
Don’t forget to take your cameras with you on holiday. It’s a great time to learn new settings that can help you get better images while not under any pressure…
And then I felt this warm drippy sensation on my arm…
Yep! If you get underneath seagulls while they are feeding you can be shat upon.
It was interesting shooting video from behind (and under) the birds. In addition to the extra present sent my way I thought it was fun capturing this angle for something a bit different.
As I was working on the Lumix GH4 4K files I saw some still frames I want to extract to to experiment with in creating some art pieces. Since I was shooting the video in 4K I’ll be able to pull 8MP still frames. Now I wasn’t shooting in 4K Photo Mode so the frames will have some movement in them which is what I like about them. If I was to capture in the Photo Mode the shutter speed would have been automatically increased in order to make sure there was no ‘Rolling Shutter” in the still frames.
Seagulls in Sarasota, Florida video.
Lots of fun to be had with the new tools that keep coming our way!
My wife Holly calls it harrassing cause I used to have to get very close to the birds to fill the frame and they often would leave in a snit at being disturbed… I call it photography while I study and capture behavior images. I really enjoy photographing birds. At her parents place which looks over the marsh in Delaware I’ve plenty of subjects.
I was curious as to how the Lumix FZ1000 would perform and I gotta tell ya it ain’t bad at all. Having a 400mm f4.0 lens is quite good. I’m even more impressed with the ability of the digital zoom going to 1600mm. At that zoom range some detail it starts to soften but being able to fill the frame from a long distance is more than worth the trade-off. Here is a sequence to show the range of the camera…
Images made from the same position. To get to the digital zoom of 1600mm you must be in jpeg capture mode.
Still, with proper exposure I’ll take the reach over being able to shoot in RAW.
Osprey doing a flyby of her nest.
If I’m going to have one camera for vacation, or just to have at hand daily – that does almost everything I need – the Lumix FZ1000 is the one.
Butterflies! Even the name kind of pushes you to run back to childhood. Especially when you walk in and the first thing that happens is a butterfly flutters around your head… and then lands on your nose! Really!
I decided to take the Lumix FZ 1000 because of the long reach, 4K video and fast glass to see what I could see…
This moth caught my eye. The warm tones and patterns with the cool colors toward the center really worked for me.
The long zoom allowed for some really nice bokeh.
A more traditional butterfly capture of a monarch on a flower.
I told you the butterfly came to visit up close and personal. Thanks to fellow visitor Phyllis Pardoll for capturing
the fleeting moment and sending me the quick snap before my visitor departed.
OK you know me and even though nature is beautiful in her own right I had to play to see what I could do to push the patterns of the moth to new places. Let me know what you think!
This is still a work in progress. Experimentation rules!
Well I gave you hint at the answer in the title of this post. All five images were created withing two minutes. How many different looks can you obtain by changing the direction in which you shoot? Look at the different color and feel of each image. The mood is totally different in each capture.
Plenty of options exist in a single situation and exploring the possibilities beyond the obvious help define us as photographers. Next time you are on a shoot circle your subject and see how many different looks come about. After a while you’ll start to pre visualize exactly what you want to show… And I’ll bet it will be different than what you are automatically photographing now.
Images captured with the Lumix GH4 100-300mm f4.0-5.6
For infrared conversion of my cameras I use LifePixel. Infrared allows you to put an older camera to use and opens up a new time time of day for productive image creation.
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A High Speed Smart Camera Remote
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