More Camera Geek Stuff
June 15th, 2014
Before I get back to posting more photos from my shoot last June in the Poconos, I’m going to detour again with some more stuff about shooting with my Panasonic G5.
Went to a concert in the park tonight. The Springfield Summer Arts Festival lasts a month, from mid-June to mid-July and has a free performance pretty much every night for more than a month. It’s a nice thing to have within walking distance of our house. The band last night was a Springsteen tribute band. They turned in a pretty lackluster performance, but it was a beautiful night and the price is right.
But, this show did give me a chance to play with my Panasonic G5 and the 45-200 (90-400 in full-frame terms) lens that my wonderful wife got me for Christmas. The lens performed pretty well. It’s f/5.6 at the long end, so the auto ISO was picking 1600 most of the time. The auto focus worked only OK at keeping up with the singers. It hit often enough, but not as often as I’d like. I left everything at the program, auto settings…dialing in some exposure compensation later in the evening when the stage lights took over from the setting sun. I shot jpegs and have posted them here unedited, other than a reduction in size. You can see that the color balance shifts around due to the changing colored stage lights. My Nikon D7000 does a better job of finding a good color balance under conditions like this.
I wasn’t real impressed with the performance of the camera and lens in this application, but it wasn’t awful. And the jpegs are nice and clean, even at 1600 ISO. Not the equipment I’d chose if I were getting paid to shoot a concert…but then again, if that were the case I wouldn’t have just stayed in my seat the whole time either.
Bottom line on the camera/lens: I could have done better with my D7000 and my 80-200 Nikkor. But the Panasonic was adequate. I think I got a few OK shots.
I also shot video of one song they performed, “Youngstown.” If you are interested in what the camera does with video you can check it out on my facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=468177136618322&set=vb.100002781188493&type=2&theater It’s not great video…hand held and there are some problems with the camera keeping focus when the lens is zoomed. You’ll see what I mean if you check it out.
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