Whenever I acquire a new bit of kit, be it hardware software or whatever, I usually do so with a specific intent in mind.
And so it was with the recently acquired Lumix FZ38.
Given such specific intent, a quirk of my own particular nature is that, having discovered how to achieve the purpose I’ve had in mind for the acquisition, I rarely investigate what other functionality it possesses.
Strange maybe, but that’s the way I am.
Consequently (and in the case of software) I’ve ended up with multiple apps that very often do the same things… although of course that’s not the way I use them.
With me its much more a case of one app for one task, a different app for another, and so on.
This peculiarity and (what some may regard as) excessive redundancy is not confined to software though. Oh no. It extends to actual physical bits of kit as well (probably explains why I seem to have so many damn computers!).
And cameras appear to be no exception.
Having learned how to achieve the specific things I want to do with a given camera it doesn’t even occur to me to investigate its other features.
My default attitude tends to be “not going to use them, so why should I bother?”
However, I’m trying to force myself into a slightly different frame of mind with aforesaid FZ38. It has a whole bunch of features built in and I really haven’t even begun to investigate how they all work, or what results (as in quality) they produce.
Case in point was the other day when I wanted to shoot a quick video clip. FZ38 was already out and in use and, knowing it had a video facility, it sort of made sense to use that.
Except I suddenly realised I didn’t have a clue how it worked and couldn’t sus out how to get it working, so consequently I ended up dragging a videocam into service. Pointless really, given it was only a sort of “10-second for fun” clip I wanted to shoot.
Don’t know whether or not I’ve taken the lesson to heart but, finding myself out and about today with the FZ38 stuck in the bag, I thought it could be worthwhile firing off a few test shots in some of the camera’s “scene modes”, just to see what sort of results it’ll produce “straight out of the box”.
Not that I have any intention of ever using those scene modes… but you never know!
Well, given that I was ambling along a fairly mundane stretch of road with wide open spaces either side choices were a bit limited, so on this occasion I confined myself to the “Scenery – Distant Landscapes” mode.
Results now uploaded to Flickr, straight as they came off-camera (shot in JPEG) with no post-processing other than…
1. Addition of watermark
2. Resizing to 1024px (the default size I upload to Flick)
3. Resolution set to 72dpi (again the default I use for Flickr uploads)
You can check them out here.
Strikes me they’re all a tad on the dark side (underexposed?) but I probably could have adjusted that had I tinkered with the metering or exposure compensation (if there is such a thing on this camera… and I’m pretty sure there is). However, it has tended to bring the colouring of the clouds out rather nicely. Nevertheless, these were only intended to be “quick and dirty” shots just to see what the camera would produce (in-camera settings are detailed in the description accompanying the Flickr set).
Had I given way to the temptation to tweak them a bit I would certainly have tried to sort out that exposure issue… and probably have straightened the horizon on a couple of them as well!
Overall though I’m fairly pleased with the results, given that pics from this camera are only ever intended for web use.
