Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ200, test shot c&c

dnme

I'm a fair weather photo taker. I have had a couple of DSLR's and dabbled in messing around with photos. As it happens, I prefer an opportunity shot rather than planning a day around taking pictures. So for me, a bridge camera is a better solution as it's light and gives me a wide range of control for the price. My old Canon Powershot S2 has seen better days so I just bought this FZ200 which seems to be a great little bridge camera. The big selling point is that it holds f2.8 right throughout the full zoom range of the lens (24x up to 600mm)

It only just arrived from Amazon yesterday so today is the first chance I have had to try it out although I did spend last night reading the manual and firing all kinds of shots at the tele
This is my dog in the kitchen today. Very little p&p apart from slight vibrance to raw before exporting to jpeg and then scaling.

I'm pretty impressed with the camera for now. It's fast in low light. The lens seems decent for such a zoom (made by Leica), loads of nice features built in. Great auto focus and very easy to use manual focus. ISO is unusable below 800 but that's to be expected for bridge size and type sensors. A sweet little camera, very light and will take the place of the Canon nicely I think.



http://www.dpreview.com/previews/panasonic-lumix-dmc-fz200

gsxr1

nice pic. I like the way the green of the dog bed is reflecting on his coat.

I think it looks a bit noisy out of focus though.

dnme

gsxr1 wrote: »

nice pic. I like the way the green of the dog bed is reflecting on his coat.

I think it looks a bit noisy out of focus though.

Yes it does, It was shot using either 400 or 800 ISO but the freeware raw app I used didn't help either. It seems to add a lot of noise withe the vibrance. I shot in Raw+Jpeg and the jpeg file that came direct from the camera is free of that noise. So I hold my hands up, I'm still only learning to process raw files. When I load them into Raw Therapee, they are very dull and I end up over compensating or using the incorrect mix of controls to get the images usable.

AnCatDubh

dnme wrote: »

ISO is unusable below 800 but that's to be expected for bridge size and type sensors.

Above 800 perhaps?

For the photo, i'm sure its a sweet memory and keepsake of your dog.

To put a critical eye on it perhaps overstating the obvious :eek:, it lacks sharpness. I don't mind soft images at all but I think it can be subjective. I also think given this subjectiveness,there will be a resulting acceptable level of sharpness which I don't think you've managed to capture.

The dog's box is causing a green hue on the dog which is a bit unnatural to my eye?

The box itself is a bit distracting (there goes the cliched word), as it is occupying a significant part of the image but is neither subject or background.

The noise is noticeable in the image but you'd probably get away with it at print stage so maybe nothing to worry about.

Given your lighting setup, you've lost a lot of the definition of the dog to the right hand side of the photo (at least on my screen you have).

Is your composition a little too close / would it benefit from showing a little more of the dog?

All the above may not be a problem if that's the way you had intended it but maybe there's something in there which might strike a chord with you. Then again, i've never done pet photography so take it with a grain of salt

Hope it helps anyway,

Cheers.