My initial impressions about Panasonic 14-42 pancake zoom are positive

Panasonic’s new 14-42 pancake zoom lens seems promising for use with GF1 or GX1 small good quality cameras although I may lose some shots because zooming is slow.

Here are my initial observations before I’ve had a chance to take any real-life photos. This is not a full review, just a description how the lens matches with my personal expectations.

• Auto focus speed very promising
  • not radically different from 14-45 kit lens = quick enough for me
• Auto focus reliability & tracking
  • can’t test today
• Very small, feels light.
  • Small size is the whole point of GF1 & GX1 cameras.
• Zooming is slooooow compared to zooming using a manual ring (that the lens doesn’t have)
  • Canon S90 compact camera zooms faster from wide to tele
  • Canon S90 has 3.8x range, this lens is only 3x.
• Lens cap ridiculously small & could be easier to insert/remove
  • I’m going to lose it one day
• No irritating wait between power on + first photo
  • 14-45 kit lens is faster because no need to move optics during power on
• Build quality good
  • Would feel safer with manual zoom ring instead of electronic zoom
• Image quality: can’t test today
  • consult pixel peepers
  • I don’t expect radical difference to 14-45 kit lens and that is good enough for me (for a small camera).

I tested with GF1 that doesn’t have the latest firmware. The lens might perform better with the newer GX1 body.

Some test images here.

Favourite Travel/Photography/… Links from Week 2011/28

Travel

• Eric Lafforgue: Mursi woman in Jinka – Omo Ethiopia
• Stop Having a Boring Life: Visiting Jerash & Aljun Castle, Jordan
• WWF: Critically endangered Amur leopards captured on video
• Sameli Kujala: The National Library (1844) (Finland)
• Nick Presniakov: Darth Vader Takes a Summer Vacation

Photography

• Scott Bourne: 20 Things I Learned About Photography
• Kalle Björklid: Portfolio
• My Modern Met: Vertigo-Inducing Photography

Other

Guitar Oscillations Captured with iPhone 4

My most recent favorites from other Flickr members

My favorites from 500px members

You’ll get more similar links if you follow me on Twitter.

Favourite Travel/Photography/… Links from Week 2011/27

Lynx at Helsinki zoo. Personal favourite from past weeks photos in my Helsinki blog.

Travel

• Ken Kaminesky: Petra – Jordan’s Incredible Historic World Wonder
• NYT: Strange Love - Experience a simulated nuclear missile launch in Titan Missile Museum, Arizona
• ICP: Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945
• Smashing Lists: 12 Really Interesting and Crazy Statues / Sculptures Around The Globe
• Velvet Escape: On board a small-ship cruise through Alaska’s Inside Passage
• Guardian: Tourists to experience a day in the life of an Icelandic whaler

Photography

• BBC: The Genious of Photography (during the 1st minute of the video you’ll see how Kertesz had prepared for this famous image)
• Nature Photographers: Ten Commandments of Composition
• Daily Mail: Cheeky monkey! Macaque borrows photographer’s camera to take hilarious self-portraits
• Washington Post: Google+ may carry dangers for photographers
• Helsinki Zoo posts photos to Flickr
• Pekka Potka: Olympus E-P3: AF speed and responsiveness (faster than very expensive Nikon pro camera!)

Suomeksi

• YLE / Matti Rämö: Polkupyörämatkalla – joka päivä (nyt Islannissa)
• Rantapallo: Venäläisbloggaajat vierailulla – tältä näyttää Suomi
• Petteri Järvinen: Citykettu Kauppatorilla

 

 

My most recent favorites from other Flickr members

My favorites from 500px members

You’ll get more similar links if you follow me on Twitter.

Favourite Travel/Photography… Links from Week 2011/26

I’m experimenting something new so here’s links to stuff that I personally enjoyed last week

Travel

• 12 oldest continuously inhabited cities Do you have any idea what they might be?
• The Power of Nature by Steve McCurry.
• Journey of a Lifetime photos from the Himalayas by Mitchell Kanashkevich
• Beautiful Milky Way Photography
• Chinese make fun with a bad photoshopping by local authorities - Love the Zidane & Materazzi one
• Grand Prismatic with a bonus – bisons arrive to a spectacular geothermal area just in time

Photography

• John Stanmeyer answers “What’s it like photographing a National Geographic story?” one of the best blog posts I’ve ever seen.
• Have You Found Your Calling? blogged how Karl Grobl found out that he had
• Finding Your Own Vision in Photography: The Helsinki Bus Station Theory  – Stay on the fucking bus! (See the great opening image too!)
• Shaken Never Stirred  Impressive Stills and Video to Market a Home
• 10 ways to improve your photography - Lightstalking

You’ll get more similar links if you follow me on Twitter.

My most recent favorites from other Flickr members

My favorites from 500px members: (Let me know if there is a way of providing a visual link to them!)

Have You Found Your Calling?

Photographer Karl Grobl has found his:

I was once driving in the sweltering, dusty desert south of Khartoum in Sudan with an NGO and a pharmaceutical company representative and the subject of, “If you won the lottery, what would you do?” came up between them. I sat in the back seat listening to them go on about how they would live life differently. All the while, I smiled and thought to myself, “ If I won the lottery, I would be doing exactly what I’m doing right now. Except, I’d be doing it for free.”

From an interview by Gary Wise.

Found the story from VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography by David duChemin.

Selecting Photography Gear for Travel So That Broken Gear Doesn’t Ruin the Trip

It’s a fact that camera gear will get broken either through accidents or wear and tear and chances are that this happens while you are far away from home. Buying a new one might not be an option if you can’t find a camera store or they are out of stock. In the worst case a single item like a broken battery/charger might make everything else unusable.

Here’s my basic travel camera setup and explanation what I will do if the item gets broken:

• Canon 5D mark II: great all-purpose camera.  I’ll switch to Canon S90 or I’ll buy an entry level DSLR.
• 2 x battery and charger: If all batteries are lost, standard AA batteries can be used with the battery grip
• Battery grip: I use only if AA batteries are needed, no need to backup.
• Canon S90: very small and surprisingly good compact camera. No need to backup.
• 16-35 ultra wide lens: 24mm of 24-105 is already pretty wide.
• 24-105 walk-around lens: 16-35 + 70-300 together cover the same focal lengths.
• 70-300 smallish telezoom lens: Shots taken with 5D + 24-105 can be heavily cropped. EF 135 f/2 as a fourth lens would be a backup.
• UV-filters on all lenses: lost lens caps won’t cause a problem.
• External flash: No backup, I wish 5D mark II would have a pop-up flash

I have enough memory cards to store all my photos and I’ll also copy the photos to an external hard drive using a netbook. When possible, I’ll have one set of photos with me and the other set somewhere else.

Something I haven’t backed up is the camera bag and naturally my Tamrac Aero 85 became unusable in Iceland after a zipper failure. In the future I’ll probably put a canvas bag in the camera bag so that I’ll have an alternative way of carrying stuff safely. This zipper failure could have become really annoying if I wouldn’t have been quite close to my hotel. To solve the situation, I bought a regular backpack.

I spent a few minutes thinking about the backups and while on the road everything is automatic. Since I try to start the editing of photos while on the road, the hard drive copies of the photos are also made without me even thinking that I’m creating backups.

An Example How Cleaning a Lens Makes a Difference

A few quick swipes to clean the lens and the interior of Halgrimskirkja in Reykjavik looks much better. Even the composition gets better ;)

The dust wasn’t evident in photos that didn’t have any bright lights.

Both photos have been exported and resized using Lightroom without any additional post processing.

Initial Impressions from Iceland 2011

I’ve returned today from Iceland and here’s a quickly selected gallery of images from the trip.

Iceland has plenty of land for a handful of people. Snæfellsnes peninsula is one of the most beautiful parts of the country.

Strokkur erupts several times an hour and its neighbour Geysir gave us the word for the phenomenon.

There is no shortage of waterfalls: Gullfoss can be easily visited from Reykjavik.

The youngest country in Europe is both barren but…

also colorful.

May was a bit chilly even for a Finn.

Iceland’s most famous eatery Bæjarins Beztu has almost always a queue of people wanting eina með öllu – one with everything. You can also order a Clinton after Bill Clinton had his with just mustard.

It’s important to know that this is a Sun Voyager and NOT a viking ship…

…and these HORSES are definitely not ponies!

The colorful people of Iceland…

…have created their own way of doing things…

…opposing rules coming from the other nations of the world.

Harpa concert and conference hall has just been opened to the public…

…and it is the latest landmark building in Reykjavik…

…that already has one of the most impressive churchs in the world: Hallgrimskirkja.

A more typical Icelandic church design.

According to the car’s navigation system we were driving on water and this 2009 photo proves that is wasn’t a malfuction.. This is the infamous Eyjafjallajökull that caused major disruptions to international air travel in 2010.

A Finnish guidebook listed the most essential expressions in Icelandic: Do you want to wrestle?

Already in mid May the days are very long and darker photos like this can be taken only during midnight.

While I was in Iceland another volcano Grimsvotn erupted. I had booked a tour to the South-East corner to see (safely) how the area had been affected. Unfortunately there was some kind of mixup and I ended up on a tour on a totally different corner of the country. I went to ask for a refund knowing that I wouldn’t leave happy even with a 2000% refund.

I Couldn’t Have Taken This Photo With a DSLR

So I took it with a compact camera that was small enough to see through the holes in the fence.

A DSLR would have provided a much better quality image because of its wider dynamic range (=the area between darkest and brightest captured area is larger). Further post processing would improve this photo as well.

I was also a bit surprised that I got the timing with the train that I wanted. Shutter lag is still quite an issue even in good quality Canon S90 compared to DSLRs.

Egypt, Syria, Jordan