Traveling light

Well, we're off on vacation pretty soon. Most of our time will be spent at Yellowstone National Park. I've never been. Everybody says it's a photographer's paradise, because it's beautiful everywhere you look, and because it has just about everything you could ask for in the way of natural beauty: mountains, prairies, geysers, waterfalls, rivers, lakes, ponds, forests, not to mention wildlife in the form of bears (two kinds), wolves, wolverines, badgers, beavers, bison, coyotes, eagles, osprey, hawks, falcons, ravens, bluebirds, and on and on. I've been doing my homework, reading both of the excellent books about photography at Yellowstone that I could find at Amazon (Lange's, and Verderber's), and getting advice from other photographers, mostly online, about where to go and what to look for. You gotta do your homework!

Well, with all this great stuff waiting for me to point a camera at it, you might think that I'd be bringing my best camera and best lenses. But you'd be wrong.

I've taken my Pentax gear with me to Rocky Mountain National Park, to the Grand Canyon, to Big Bend, to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, and elsewhere. And yes, it does a terrific job. If somebody were paying me to go to Yellowstone and take photos, I guess I'd take my Pentax gear.

But I've decided this time to go light. I'm leaving the DSLRs and all the lenses at home, and I'm taking just a couple of Panasonic fixed-lens cameras. I hasten to add, a couple of very good fixed-lens cameras.

For landscapes

For landscapes, I'll rely on the old Panasonic LX3, which still seems to me the very best digital compact camera ever. With its outstanding ultra-wide (24mm equivalent) Leica lens, it's a perfect camera for landscapes, like this shot of the spillway at White Rock Lake in Dallas:



The LX3 is terrific for macro (close-up) photography, as well.



I have a circular polarizing filter (for shooting the geysers) and a neutral density filter (possibly for shooting waterfalls) for use with the LX3, so I think I'm in good shape.

In the past, if I was shooting a landscape with a Pentax DSLR, I have relied mainly on the Sigma 10-20 ultrawide zoom, an outstanding lens. It's the only lens I took with me to the bottom of the Grand Canyon last Christmas. In 35mm equivalence, its range is 15mm to 30mm, so it gives me a considerably wider angle of view than the LX3's 24mm. But the LX3 has twice the reach at the other end (it goes to 60mm). In short, the LX3 is right in the range where I take most of my photographs. If it were a bit better in low light, I could shoot a wedding with the LX3, something I would never try with the Sigma 10-20! If I weren't going to use the LX3 at Yellowstone, I'd have to take the Sigma 10-20 AND at least one, probably two of my prime lenses, perhaps the Sigma 28 and the Sigma 40. More likely, for Yellowstone (since it's not the Grand Canyon), I'd leave the 10-20 at home and take the Pentax 21 and the Pentax 40. Those are both small lenses. Still, that would be three to four times heavier than the LX3 and bulkier by about the same factor.

But if I had a Pentax DSLR body and the 21 and 40mm primes, I would still lack a couple of things the LX3 offers: outstanding macro capability, and the ability to shoot high-def video!

For wildlife

The harder, much harder, part of the problem is what to take to shoot wildlife. I'm a portrait photographer, a wedding photographer, and the fine lenses that I have are all in the wide to normal to weak telephoto range. My only long lens is a Tamron 70-300, which is a decent consumer lens, but, well, not in the league of the stuff I take to a wedding.

The reason I have the Tamron 70-300 is that it's very affordable. Really high-quality telephoto lenses like the Pentax DA* 300 or the Sigma 150-500 ("Bigma") are not.

At first, I thought I'd just stick with what I had already, the LX3, and, well, just look at the wildlife through binoculars. But I decided that was crazy. But I didn't want to bring a DSLR and the 70-300, either. If I am going to go light, I'm going to go light.

So I decided to get a second compact camera with a good telephoto zoom.

I first tried the Pentax X90. I don't really want to talk about it. Pentax's DSLRs are terrific, really top notch. Its compact cameras, alas, not so much.

After a little more research, it became clear that Panasonic has ruled the compact camera category, or at least been a major competitor and innovator in that field, for years. So I tried the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7. The image quality was pretty good, and the zoom had a pretty good reach, too (300mm equivalent). Here's a pic of a coot:



The detail in the coot's feathers is actually better than it looks in this web-ready image. The ZS7 is compact and has GPS built-in, although I probably would not use the GPS feature in Yellowstone because we'll be camping and I'm going to be worried about battery use. The ZS7 seems like a really nice camera for a lot of photographers, and I've seen some wonderful photos taken with it. But for me, it had a couple serious weaknesses. First, it doesn't support raw capture. (The LX3 does, by the way.) I am not yet sure whether I'll shoot raw in Yellowstone or not but I want to have the option. Second, the ZS7's 300mm (equivalent) reach is just not going to be long enough to photograph a wolf or a baby bison. A final problem with the ZS7, for me personally anyway, is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn't support add-ons in any way. Mainly that means that I can't use it with filters.

So the ZS7 went back, too. And now I have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ35, which is what I'll be taking with me to Yellowstone. Its zoom range is from 27mm to an awesome 486mm (equivalent). With the Panasonic LT55 telephoto conversion lens attached, the FZ35 can actually reach over 800mm (equivalent)! And did I mention that it cost $300—a small fraction of what I'd have to spend to get a better, longer lens for my Pentax DSLR body.

Unlike the Pentax X90, the Panasonic FZ35 produces photos that I think are really pretty good. And unlike the Panasonic ZS7, the FZ35 also supports raw capture, and it accepts filters. Folks, we have a winner. Well, it's not as compact as the ZS7. But it is very light.

Zoom zoom

How good is the FZ35's zoom? Well, consider this. Here's a shot I took from the east side of White Rock Lake (near my house in Dallas). I'm looking west across the lake toward the old pump house.



Interesting side note: The blur on the left side of the photo was caused by an insect on the lens. You have to keep your lenses clean, even if you have a compact camera!

Now the previous photo is a bit deceptive. The wide-angle view makes even the biker seem farther away than he is. He's probably about 35-40 ft away. But as you can see, the pump house is a long way away. I just tried to calculate the distance using Google Maps, and it's about half a mile across the lake at this point. Imagine that there was a wolf or a baby bison standing on the porch of the pump house. I'd be out of luck, right?

Maybe not. Here's a photo of the pump house taken with the FZ35's zoom extended all the way (486mm equivalent).



And here's a shot with the 1.7x teleconverter attached.



OK, if there were a wolf, say, lying on its side on the porch of the pump house, I'm not saying I'd be able to tell if it was a boy or a girl. But I'm pretty sure I could tell it was a wolf and not a coyote, which is a good start.

Of course, test shots of far-away buildings aren't really very indicative of how the lens will perform if I'm shooting wildlife. Perhaps this is a better example of the FZ35's zoom range. This was taken from the same spot as the previous pic, and the rowers were in the middle of the lake.



And here's an uncropped shot of a scissor-tailed flycatcher that was zipping around where I was taking these other photos.



Compare that to this cropped photo of a scissor-tail that I took down in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge a few years ago:



That was taken with the Tamron 70-300.

Proof is in the prints

So is this a good idea—leaving the really good cameras and lenses at home, and taking a couple of inexpensive "point and shoot" cameras? I think so, but to be honest, I won't really know until I get back and get some images printed. A big weakness of image comparisons on the Internet is that they're limited by the display medium, your monitor. Sometimes you can't really tell how much better one image is than another until you send both to a high-quality printer. I'll back to you at the end of the summer when we're back and I've had a chance to print and review my photos.

And if it does turn out to be a bad idea, I'll just have to go back to Yellowstone and try again.

Redesign underway

I'm in the process of redesigning everything—my web site, my galleries, and this blog. Rather harder than you might think. For one thing, the web site is designed by moi and coded by moi. (Tip: Don't hire a photographer because you think their web site is cool. There's a better than even chance they bought the template for the web site.) Anyway, I code the web site, but the galleries are hosted at zenfolio.com, and the blog is hosted by Blogger (a Google service). Getting all three to have a consistent look is almost impossible. Very frustrating. Anyway, it's not going to get done now until we get back from vacation in mid-July.

Perspective correction in Lightroom 3!

Sometimes my prayers are answered. I've been using the Lightroom 3 beta for months, but Lightroom 3 was just officially released, and I was overjoyed to discover that it includes perspective correction tools that weren't there in the beta.

What's perspective correction? Well, here's a photo I took today in downtown Dallas, on the east side.



And here's the same photo, after a little perspective correction on the vertical axis.



Makes a big difference, no?

Here's the photo I was really after. Click to view it full size:



This panorama was actually created in Photoshop Elements 8, and then given final processing in Lightroom 3; so the perspectival correction in the pano was done in Photoshop. But it's nice to know I can now fix single images in Lightroom 3 when I need to.

Panasonic LX3: How wide is wide?

Yesterday I took a couple pictures at the lake, using the unassisted LX3 at its widest angle (= 24mm in full-frame terms), and then using the Panasonic DMW-LW46 Wide Conversion Lens. Unfortunately, the scene I was photographing didn't have enough distinguishing features in it to show the difference in angles of view clearly. So today I tried again, this time shooting the back of my house.

Here's a shot of our garage, with the LX3 zoomed in as tight as it can go (= 60mm in full-frame terms). Note that in this shot and in the two that follow, I'm standing about 30 ft away from the near corner of the garage.

In full-frame terms, 60mm is a weak telephoto; the "normal" angle of view is around 50mm.

The following shot was taken with the LX3 zoomed out to its widest angle of view (= 24mm in full-frame terms).

And finally, here's the same scene captured using the LW46 Conversion Lens, which takes the LX3 to an effective ultra-wide angle of view of 18mm.

Is the LW46 worth its small price? I certainly think so.

*

Postscript a week later (6-19-2010): Notwithstanding the enthusiasm I felt for it when I was writing about it above, I decided to return the LW46 wide-angle conversion lens. The lens itself really is quite good and I would not discourage anybody from getting it. However, what I decided for myself was that the lens kind of defeated the point of the LX3, which is to have a small camera with some flexibility. With the conversion lens mounted, the LX3 is no longer pocketable. And once the conversion lens is attached, you can't zoom; you're only able to shoot at the effective 18mm focal length. I've decided that, when I need to go wider than 24mm (effective), I can just take two or three shots and stitch them together. See my next post.

More about the Panasonic LX3

In my post yesterday I simply shared a few of the photos I've taken with the LX3. I think I should add a little technical info, for anybody who's actually interested in the camera.

Cons

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 has very few cons. Perhaps the main one right now is that the model itself is a year and a half old. There are rumors about a new model (possibly called LX5) being released later this year. I didn't worry about it. There's always something newer and better ready for release next month.

So what are the LX3's disadvantages?

Well, first, the telephoto end of the camera's zoom range doesn't reach very far—a mere 60mm in 35mm equivalence. If you want to take photographs of birds, well, don't buy the LX3. I wish Panasonic sold a companion camera with a zoom that ran from, oh, 70-300 in 35mm terms. But they don't. I'm happy to have the LX3's superior wide-angle performance. And to be honest, given my experience in recent years shooting with prime (fixed focal length) lenses on my Pentax DSLRs, I find the LX3's modest zoom range easy to live with. Any zoom at all is a novelty to me.

A second and clearer disadvantage is that the LX3 produces rather noisy images at ISOs over about 400. You can find examples of this in all of the reviews of the LX3. I personally don't find this much of a real disadvantage, either, not because I like noisy images, but because this criticism can be thrown at any small-sensor camera. If you want to shoot in really low light and get stellar results, you buy a DSLR, and even there, some are better than others. The LX3 does have a built-in flash that works tolerably well, but I have reconciled myself to the fact that the LX3 isn't going to be taking photos in the dark.

Third disadvantage: no viewfinder. As it comes out of the box, the LX3 expects you to frame photos using its LED screen. The screen is big (3"), bright and high-res (460,000 pixels), but when you shoot in bright sun, using the screen can be difficult. A built-in viewfinder should provide a tiny duplicate of the LED screen that you can put your eye up to and see clearly even in bright sun. A built-in viewfinder would display your current camera settings, and would zoom as you zoom. However, a built-in viewfinder would also make the camera bigger; see the Canon G10 or G11. In keeping with the Rangefinder esthetic of the LX3, Panasonic decided to release instead, as an add-on, an external optical viewfinder (EOV). The EOV allows you to frame your photo, somewhat approximately, while you hold the camera to your eye. Holding the camera to your eye is a more stable way to hold the camera; and it also eliminates the problem of viewing the LED in bright sun. The drawback of the EOV is that it doesn't communicate with the camera in any way, so you don't get a TTL (through-the-lens) view before you take your photo. Guidelines on the EOV's viewing screen show you the dimensions of a photo with the 3x2 aspect ratio, which is just one of the three aspect ratios at which the LX3 can shoot. So if you are trying to frame your shot with absolute precision, well, you might want to turn on the display screen. But I've found that it's possible to do a pretty good job framing shots with the EOV. And turning off the LED dramatically reduces battery consumption.

Those are the only significant disadvantages or cons that I can think of.

Pros

The LX3 has too many advantages for me to list them all. Here are a few that matter to me.

1. Optically outstanding Leica lens, with a wonderful wide-angle reach of 24mm (in 35mm film SLR terms) and a max aperture of f/2 to f/2.8. In a sense, the LX3 is what any serious photographer wants: a terrific lens, with a camera attached.
   
2. The LX3 supports raw capture. Actually, this was one of the main things that drew me to the camera, but the more I shoot with it, and considering that I'm using it only for personal photos rather than for work for clients, the more I'm leaning towards shooting jpeg in the camera. Still, I'm happy to know that the raw capability is there if I want it.
   
3. The LX3 gives me the ability to control just about everything, indeed, the number of options and controls is a bit bewildering at first, even to someone used to working with a pro DSLR. The LX3 does have the standard PASM exposure modes (program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and full manual). P has a program-shift feature that resembles the K20D's hyper-program feature, so in a way, you don't need A or S at all. What I'm discovering, however, is that the camera is smart enough that I can put it into P mode and just shoot.
   
4. The big, high-res LED is even better than the displays on my DSLRs, and I'm still enjoying how good pictures look on the back of the camera.
   
5. I can focus manually if I need to.
   
6. Amazing close-focus (macro) capability. The LX3 can focus from 1 cm. And here the LX3's small sensor provides an advantage over shooting with my DSLRs and the excellent macro lenses I have: at a given focal distance, smaller sensors yield greater depth of field.
   
7. The LX3 has the rare ability to shoot at multiple aspect ratios, while maximizing the use of the sensor and at the same time maintaining the same angle of view on the scene. It took me a while (and a little calculating) to realize how interesting an achievement this is. The LX3 doesn't just crop, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that it crops all three of the basic aspect ratios (4:3, 3:2 and 16:9). As of firmware version 2.1, the LX3 can also take a 1:1 aspect ratio shot.
   
8. The LX3 has an internal buffer that can be used to store a couple of photos. This is brilliant. A month or two I grabbed a camera and ran to the lake to photograph a gorgeous rainbow. Jumped out of the car, framed my shot—and then realized that the camera didn't have a card in it. If I'd grabbed the LX3, I would have been able to take the shot anyway.
   
9. Build quality. The LX3 is a nice piece of work that feels like a serious, old-fashioned camera. A lot of other cameras sold these days, including some that are expensive and take very good photos, feel like cheap toys by comparison.
   

There are literally dozens of other little things about the LX3 that I'm discovering and coming to like very much, like the intelligent ISO feature, video capture (which I don't use much but am grateful to have), and voice annotations.

In a nutshell

In short, the LX3 has a terrific lens, is a pleasure to shoot with, and yet is going to keep challenging me, because I know that, if I take a lousy photo with the LX3, I can't blame it on the camera.

The Panasonic LX3: The perfect personal camera (for me)?

I haven't shot with a fixed-lens, compact camera for about five years. But recently I decided I wanted a camera compact enough to go everywhere with me, comfortably. The only problem was that the camera also had to take truly outstanding pictures. My research and testing led me to the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. I've been putting it through its paces lately and I'm impressed with what this little camera can do.

Double-wide

One of the most remarkable of the many remarkable features of the LX3 is that the lens, an optical gem made by Leica, goes wider than just about any other compact camera: to 24mm in 35mm film equivalence. At the telephoto end of the lens's zoom range, it only goes to 60mm, which isn't much of a telephoto at all. In short, this is a camera made to go wide, very wide.

This makes it perfect for working inside.



Or outside, in the wide-open spaces.



I used to think that telephoto reach was what I wanted most from a camera. I've changed my mind. Now I want everything double-wide, and the LX3 delivers.

Up close

The LX3 also lets me get close, really close. It's a good thing that my model here (Beebe the guinea pig) and I are on pretty good terms.



Wide and close can be nice. I was only an inch or two from this flower:



Although sometimes, simply very close is all that's needed. This was taken from less than an inch away:

Raw or jpeg?

I've been a raw evangelist for a while. "Raw" capture is what every digital camera's sensor does. When photographers say they "shoot raw," they mean that they like to save all of the data seen by the sensor, so they can work with it on their computers later. The LX3 supports raw capture, and indeed, that was one of the reasons I bought it. (Most compact cameras do not.)

But I've discovered that the LX3's in-camera conversion of raw data to jpeg format is outstanding, and although it seems like heresy for me to say this, I'm tempted to start shooting jpeg with this camera. I spend too much time processing photos for clients. I'd be happy not to spend so much time processing my own photos. This picture was created by the camera's built-in jpeg procesing engine and it's indistinguishable from the jpeg that I created myself in Adobe Lightroom 3 from the raw file:

The perfect personal camera (for me)

In short, the LX3 seems to be the perfect personal camera, at least for a wide-angle photographer like me. The Panasonic wide-angle conversion lens, available as an add-on for the LX3, takes the camera to an amazing ultra-wide angle focal length of 18mm (in 35mm film camera terms), and I think I'll find a use for that focal length when we go to Yellowstone National Park later this year. In fact, I think I'm going to leave my Pentax DSLRs and all my lenses at home and rely on the LX3. I'm confident it can do the job.

*

Postscript 6-15-2010: For details on what I like most about the LX3, see my next post, here.

What people like, face to face

Last Sunday (May 23, 2010) I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon sitting in a beautiful garden and talking for most of the day to strangers about a few of my photos. I was there as part of the East Dallas Gardens and Artisans Tour. My wife and I have been going to these art fairs for as long as we can remember, but this was the first time I'd taken part in one myself as an "artist" or exhibiter or (as I would prefer) a craftsman. And it was a treat.

In this post, I simply want to comment on a few of the photos that I was showing that day. If you came by, you will already have heard some of this from me in person.

The Grand Canyon photos

I was quite sure that people would comment on this photo, taken at the start of our hike down into the Grand Canyon last December.



I expected it to get comments in good part because I'd made a large (20" x 30") print and had it beautifully custom framed by Decor Art & Frame on Greenville in Dallas. Frames matter! But I'm proud of the photo. Most of my Grand Canyon photos look like everybody else's. It's hard to take a striking photo of a cliche. But we had the good fortune (as well as the challenge) to be hiking down the Bright Angel Trail last December during a fairly significant snow storm. And this gave me a view of the canyon that, while not unique, isn't very common, either. I was happy to get the Kolb Brothers historic photographic studio into the photo. For the same reason, I've always been fond of this photo, taken five years ago from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, on a day when clouds had settled into the canyon:



If you want good photos of a popular place like the Grand Canyon, one way to increase your chance of success is to keep going back.

White Rock Lake

In my tour display the other day, I also included a couple of my favorite photos of White Rock Lake. I had a couple of the Mockingbird Lane foot bridge. One in the fog, taken with an ultra-wide angle lens:



And another, one of my favorites, taken with a telephoto lens and from a slightly different vantage point, during a rare snowstorm in Dallas (February 11, 2010):



I think it's interesting to compare the photo above, with this photo that was taken just about the same time:



I like this second photo, too. I like having the jogger in the photo, for scale and also for color. Wish that the car was missing, though. And this second photo has too much going on: the tree, the jogger, the car, the snow. The first photo is, well, simpler: it's a picture of a bridge in a snowstorm. There's a tree in it, too, but the tree is way off to the side and not really part of the "subject." I mean, if you are going to photograph a tree, photograph a tree, like this:



Or this, from the Dallas Arboretum:



Of the photos of White Rock Lake in the snow last February, next to the bridge photo (above), this was probably the most popular photo among my visitors:



That's Lake Highlands Drive, just east of the Bath House on the east side of the lake. Actually, I was taking a photo of the Bath House and the lake, and I wasn't happy. Then I realized why: the lake didn't have snow on it. I turned to the left, and got the photo above. Maybe we have a special appreciation for the beauty of snow here in Dallas. We don't see much of it.

People liked the photos of the lake in the fog, too, including this photo of the old boat house near T. & P. Hill:



And this picture of the boats at the Corinthian Sailing Club:



That photo, like the photo of the bridge in the snow, was not "Photoshopped." Fog is a wonderful artistic filter.

My favorites

Perhaps my favorite, of the photos I displayed last Sunday, is this photo that I took several years ago of my dog Abby running in our back yard:



The technique here is simple: pan the camera sideways to follow the movement of the subject. The background inevitably blurs. Here, it produces a very painterly image.

Kids liked the running dog. But this seemed to be the favorite photo of many of my adult visitors:



Many people assumed it was two photos, stitched or "Photoshopped" together. Nope. That's my mother-in-law on the left, and my daughter on the right, and the photo was taken at my dinner table. I looked up from dinner, saw the photo, and snapped the shot. That white, blank wall behind my mother-in-law really is that white, blank and lonely. And behind my background there really is a shelf with dishes, a hallway with a photo, and a bedroom door. But of course what really make the photo is, first, my mother-in-law's expression. She's not actually unhappy. She just doesn't want to expend the effort to smile. And the second key element is my daughter's hat. Yep, that's what she wore to dinner. What can I say? It was a new hat.

What's the lesson here, boys and girls? Keep the camera with you, even at the dinner table. You just never know...