amipal photography

Last weekend I got up stupidly early to travel half way across the country to attend an airshow. But what an airshow! The Royal International Air Tattoo 2018! A word of warning - this is going to be a looooong post. Grab yourself a cup of tea and settle down... I haven't been to an airshow, or at least shot aircraft flying since the Goodwood Revival in 2015, where they had a number of warbirds from the Second World War flying. My equipment back then was my trusty GH3 with the first-generation Lumix 100-300mm lens, and my GM5 with Lumix 14-140mm as backup. These performed well as a pair, allowing me to grab take off, landing, and formation shots with the surprisingly-capable GM5, and the longer, single aircraft detail shots with the GH3. At the time, AF-S was used on both cameras, as I didn't trust the reliability of the continuous auto-focus offered by either - bare in mind that at this point, Panasonic had yet to introduce their Depth from Defocus technology to assist wit...

Due to some recent building work, I'm been stuck working from home for the last four weeks. Which is both a blessing and a curse - being stuck in the same room for days at a time with little human contact makes one a little stir crazy. Cabin fever is real, people. Anyway, this has led me to heading out for a walk after dinner of an evening; for exercise, for fresh air, for something other than the constant four walls. I have the benefit of both the South Downs and English Channel being a five minute walk from my house, depending on the direction I walk in, both of which are an ideal prescription for being stuck indoors for days on end. On a recent walk along the clifftop to Rottingdean, the sun was getting low and heading towards setting. Currently, there's a lot of long dry grass up there, and this created a wonderful contrast where tall bright stalks rose up above the heavily shaded undergrowth. I'd actually gone along there with my camera and a superzoom lens expecting...

This post is a bit preemptive. I've only owned the Lumix G9 for three months (as of June 2018), and most of my other cameras served me well for around two years. So I feel the G9 has a bit more time ahead of it before I reach the true potential offered by it. Panasonic Lumix G9 March 2018 to Now ~2500 shots I'm rather impressed with the G9, as I detailed in my review earlier in the year. It handles my favourite lens, the fully-manual Voigtlander f/0.95 17.5mm, very well indeed - the new sensor brings out some stunning clarity from it, the IBIS makes those low-light shots pin-sharp, and the amazing EVF (has to be seen to be believed) makes focussing a breeze. But it is the continuous auto-focus tracking which is really surprised me. Panasonic have produces a camera which can truly keep a running toddler in-focus, despite not having any phase-detect on-sensor. It rarely misses target, though I will test it properly at RIAT this year - fast-moving jets should prove a nice cha...

I blame peer-pressure and a good deal for my upgrade to the GH4. My GH3 was perfectly fine when I bought the GH4 - I was happy with the photos it took, happy with the ergonomics of the camera, battery life, pretty much everything. The GH3 had traveled with me to many countries, and had shot thousands of frames at airshows in the South East of England. In fact, the GH3 still holds my personal record for most shots taken with a single camera, the 22,500 shutter actuations dwarfing all others. Panasonic Lumix GH4 March 2016 to Now 14000+ shots The GH4, much like the GH2 was to the GH1, was more of an evolution of the previous camera. The body was more of the same - that same ideal-button-placement, that same weather-sealed magnesium-alloy chunkiness - though, internally, Panasonic had introduced the new-fangled 4K video. And in order to do so, had altered the plumbing considerably. This made the GH4 a perfect photographer's camera. It had a large buffer that wrote files to the c...

Come the summer of 2015, my Olympus E-PL1 was beginning to show its age. It had served me well on a variety of jaunts across the South East of England in preparation for a big walk - the BHF London to Brighton 100k Trek. The E-PL1 joined me on this walk to, and meant that I could document the trek from start to finish. Panasonic Lumix GM5 August 2015 to Now 4200+ shots Having switched to the GH3 at the beginning of the year though, I was getting used to better image quality and better editing latitude from the RAW files, and the old E-PL1 just didn't cut it any more. It was telling that when trying to sell the camera on eBay, I didn't get a single bid on the auction - it wasn't just me that didn't want the ancient Olympus. I already had my eye on what I would be replacing it with. I wanted another backup camera that I could carry around with me that could also take advantage of my now-large lens collection. After struggling with the parred-back controls of the E-...

Panasonic had realised with the GH1 and GH2 just how much demand there was for high-quality, low-cost mirrorless cameras capable of brilliant video capture. And it was with the 2013-released GH3 that they responded to many of the demands that users had asked for. Panasonic Lumix GH3 January 2014 to December 2016 22500 shots Gone was the multi aspect Panasonic sensor, replaced with a 16 megapixel unit from Sony - the same, it transpires, as used in Olympus's at-the-time recently released OM-D E-M5 . This was a more capable sensor than the one used in the previous model, which helped with better noise handling at higher ISOs and higher-bit-rate video. Gone too was the compact body. Now, the GH3 was a chunkier magnesium alloy affair, and now weather-sealed. It was a huge improvement ergonomically over the GH2 - after shooting airshows for many hours with the GH2, my hand ached, mainly because there wasn't enough room around the handgrip for all fingers. This was no longer th...