Photography

I've had my little Lumix GF-1 for two months plus now. This is not a technical or "proper" review of the camera but it's more like my experience using it. My GF-1 comes with the 14-45mm stabilized lens. I might add the 20mm pancake lens at some point but for now, it's a one-lens camera. My reason for the GF-1 is purely to complement my full-sized 35mm DSLR. I use the 5D Mark II by the way so the GF-1 is not a replacement for my main cameras. The GF-1 is used for situations where a larger DSLR and lenses are not required. For me, it's primarily for travel and all-round carry with me camera. My need for the GF-1 comes from situations where I would like a better camera than my iPhone but the situation doesn't warrant me carrying my 5D.

Travel. I always travel with my full kit of photo equipment. However, there are times the GF-1 gets used such going down for the hotel breakfast, on the flight, serious hiking when my DSLR is stowed because I need my hands. Since the GF-1 is lightweight, I can have the GF-1 around my neck, ready to shoot something. It's also less intrusive when doing street photography. As the GF-1 can look like a little point and shoot camera, more likely everyone's going to ignore what you're doing. When not traveling, the GF-1 goes with me to little restaurants, coffee shops, work (sometimes), and all sorts of places. Currently, either I carry it naked as is or in my ThinkTank Photo Speed Changer. I'm looking to get either the Trim Changer or All the Other Stuff as a permanent GF-1 case though. It's a relatively hardy little camera though and fairly well built.

Performance
The GF-1 is pretty much fast enough for almost everything I use it for. From street photography to people and a little bit of action. Yes, the buffer is small when you shoot raw but if I'm shooting fast action, chances are, I'm using my DSLR. Quality is good if you keep the ISO below 800 and if you shoot raw. In well lit scenes (i.e. outdoors), the quality can be comparable to a cropped sensor DSLR (i.e. 500D, 50D, etc). In low light, the sensor does struggle but you can have everything. Battery life is amazingly good -- I do have a spare and I only charge it after three days. Note that I do use my DSLR as well so remember that this is assuming a second camera. That said, I have the camera power save set to five minutes and it's hardly turned off. Auto-focus is mostly good with occasional misses. The stabilized lens helps here. The lens hood works well to minimize flare and I've used the GF-1 in light rain, heavy wet fog without problems.

The ability to shoot HD movies is great although audio capture is just average without an external mic. The wind-filter works to some extent but it doesn't help stop user and other little sounds from being captured. The AVCHD lite codec is a pain in the ass to work with though.

Ergonomics and usability
The menu system is overly complex and the usage of icons and abbreviations doesn't help. I find it easy to inadvertently set something up when the camera is bumping around powered on. The small size however makes camera shake more pronounced. The shutter lag is almost negligible with the camera focusing and taking the shot almost as you press. That can't be said about the video though. The dedicated video start/stop button is great but it's laggy and sometimes takes a second or two to register. That said, if you ensure the shutter speed is relatively fast (1/100s), you can get great results. It's also the camera I let other friends, local guides or strangers to take photos of myself or our group.

Image quality
In China, I shot RAW exclusively. While noise levels above ISO 800 was fairly high, it definitely beats any point-n-shoot's pixel dense sensor out there. The ten-plus megapixel (I'm no fan of 4:3 ratio images so the GF1 is set to 3:2 ratio) images are quite awesome - with some processing, they look great. With ISO 1600 or 2500, a bit of noise reduction processing (I use Noise Ninja), the output is still pretty fantastic. With ISO set below 800, prints up to 12R (12" x 16") are quite achievable and look indistinguishable from any mid-range DSLR.

For some real reviews, you can check DPReview or Steve's Digicams.

A sign of the times. It used to be little kiosks selling CR123, CR5 or CR2 lithium batteries (remember those) and AA, AAA batteries alongside boxes and boxes of Kodak and Fuji film. Today, if you find your fancy-pants digital camera running low on juice or memory cards, you go look for a little stall like this one.

This little kiosk in the Yuyuan area in Shanghai was selling all sorts of media cards (CF, SD, SDHC, etc) along with 3rd party made-in-China batteries in various Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic flavors. They do say that the batteries are "charged" so you can just pop them in and use them. This particular kiosk still had some film products but they were heavily showing off their instant inkjet printing service. While Kodak may be a icon of the film era, its transition to the digital era has hit some turbulence. So while they had a couple of rolls of Kodak film, majority of their products are for digital cameras. I wonder when I might see a Sandisk branded kiosk... soon perhaps?

p.s. what "real" photographer would only have one battery and one memory card with him/her at one time?

Looks like wet weather put a damper on my predicted shoot rate. The other factor being the red-eye flight contributed to a wash-out day in terms of photography. How much was I off? Well, I predicted for 10-days I'd shoot approximately 280 Gigabytes. I returned with 93 Gigabytes. Looks like off by quite a bit but then, we had spent over 12 hours and 1500km on the road and rail. How much can you shoot from a moving vehicle? Also, I realized that my GF1 cannot be counted to be a third camera when estimating disk/shoot usage. You can't use two cameras at the same time so the 60 gigs I estimated for the GF1 dropped to only 21 gigs -- and I had 30 gigs of SDHC available. Anyways, always good to be prepared so while I could have saved some cash by not getting my 320Gb Seagates, they always will come in handy next trip... or anyone interested buying them off me? They are in black and silver colors.

It wasn't very long ago that RM1,000 (about US$300) bought you a 128Mb Sandisk Compact Flash card. Go a bit more and that same amount got you a 1Gb Sandisk Ultra II that wrote at about 5mb/second. Today, you can get a 32Gb Extreme IV (the Extreme Pro's are a bit more than that) that has a 60Mb/second speed. That's the good. The thing also is that when I had a 128Mb CF card, I had a 1.6 megapixel digital camera, shooting JPEG only. I think it also only had ISO 100, 200 and 400. Those images were about 500 Kb in size. Now, I shoot 21 megapixel 14-bit RAW images, ISO 50 to 25,600. Oh, plus HD movies that chew 320Mb per minute. So, the point is basically this - you can never have enough storage cards. I'm packing over a hundred-twenty-odd gigs (CF and SD combined)... and sure, I could use a couple more 16-gig cards

It was a bright, hot, sweltering day that the official opening ceremony for SEMOA's Kebun Orang Asli in Tras. We had the privilege to cover the event and it was an amazing day. It started of course with a day that was so bright, there was about five-stops difference in light between outdoors and indoors. Again, I relied on my RadioPoppers to illuminate the scene. We had like five flash units going off to equalize the light difference. Enough speedlights and you can match the power of the sun! Besides Yang Berhormat Bernard Dompok, Minister of Plantation, Industries and Commodities, we also had the local Tras assemblyman, Mr Choong Siew Onn.

Kebun SEMOA is an effort by the SEMOA group (supported by many churches and individuals in Malaysia) providing education, help, and medical care to the local indigenous population (orang asli) in the Tras, Raub and Bentong area.

Begin with an East meets West kind of wedding that started at Church in an easy, breezy style. Turn the event 180 degrees around and end with a 300 guest sit-down nine course Chinese dinner. Well, a Chinese wedding will not be complete if you don't at least fete your guests with a proper sit-down dinner. No standing around reception or buffet style luncheons. Chinese dinners need a many-course meal starting with some four-season dish and shark's fin soup. What do you do if you want to be environmentally conscious and nature-loving? Drop the shark's fin soup for some delicious seafood soup. Enough said. This was one easy dinner with lots of fun, emotional speeches and lovely people. Best part was when the toasting session went from "Cheers!" to "YAMMM-SENNGG" (in English: Bottom's Up!) in like five seconds! Yup, the sound of the East rising...

Not everyday one gets a chance to cover an event that is attended by an elected assemblyman and an appointed minister of parliament but well, there is always a first time. For once it feels a bit like one of those journalists chasing politicians. How does that differ from chasing brides? Well, I think brides are way lovelier and more beautiful. Hah! Anyways, stay tuned for more. I've a wedding to continue to process, massive travel packing to get done and this event shoot to complete in the next 48 hours! Plus my day job!

Here's a couple of photos from Miriam and Chris' solemnization at PJ Gospel Hall. More to come ... wasn't the main shooter so I just kept to doing a few key shots that I'd like to get.