Adventures With Panasonic LX100

How has the holiday season been for everyone?

I had a quiet Christmas, which followed by my Birthday. Yes I was born on a Boxing Day. I did some light street shooting around town, spend almost entire Christmas and Boxing Day reading a book, the "Doctor Sleep" from Stephen King which was a direct sequel to "The Shining" and had some small gathering with friends. I could not have asked for a better way to spend the holidays. A bit of shutter therapy, some coffee, awesome friends, and finally, some time off to actually read a book!

My adventures with the Panasonic LX100 continues with my recent shutter therapy sessions. As I have mentioned in my previous blog entry, as long as I shot everything in RAW and spent some time post-processing the images, the LX100 can deliver beautiful images. While the camera operations (mainly dials, rings and manual controls) can get overwhelming, I have simplified my street shooting workflow and made the LX100 work for me. The focusing was quick enough for me to grab some spontaneous shots, which was crucial for my street shooting.

I did however find that the lens was an interesting aspect of the camera, not being clinically sharp at any focal length, but it offers a very pleasing overall rendering of an image. I particularly love how the wide angle 24mm shot wide open at F1.7 can still create decent amount of shallow depth of field for subject isolation (though you should really not look at 100% view, the mushiness of details is disturbing). Also, zooming in at 75mm F2.8, the lens is decent in sharpness.

LX100 vs The Antman

Portrait of a Stranger 1. Shot at 75mm, F2.8. 

I can still achieve a good degree of separation, isolating the subject from the background. This was the main reason I chose LX100 over any other cameras such as the Sony RX100. 

At 75mm, the lens on the LX100 shows reasonable sharpness, and respectable coming from a zoom lens. 

Run

Autofocus was quick and responsive, more than good enough to capture crucial shots. 

Fly

What are you looking at?

Flash

Portrait of a Stranger 2

Clouds

Joy

This is my favourite shot of the series. Simply love the facial expression on both the baby and the mother (I think she was). 

Swordsman

Paper Hat

This was taken at ISO1600, which was still very good.

Family

This was also shot at ISO1600

Petaling Street Entrance

ISO3200

Passing By 

ISO3200

Beef Noodles

ISO3200

A Little Drizzle

ISO3200

Sharing a Cover

ISO3200

Fan

ISO3200

The Christmas Tree

This was shot with 1/2 sec shutter speed. While the lens was optically stabilized, I found trouble steadying the lens at 24mm wide angle, even at half a second shutter speed. I guess I am too used to using the Olympus 5-Axis IS. 

Gold

There is just something in the rendering of the LX100 that is nice. 

It has been a while since I last did a panning shot. This was just for fun. 

Deals

KL Tower

I have a feeling that this could be my last blog entry for the year 2016. 

Wow, the year is almost over. And strangely, this year has been the year that I have blogged the least, despite my ambition of doing more blog updates. Work has been super super busy, more than I have originally anticipated. 

As for the Panasonic LX100, I think it is a camera that needs some time to get used to. Once I have warmed up to the camera, it is quite an enjoyable camera to use. It has it's shortcomings, but hey, there are no perfect cameras out there. Most importantly, I do quite like the images I have made with the LX100. 

How has the year 2016 been for you? 

Panasonic Lumix LX100 is available from B&H here.