An actual, daily user review of the Panasonic/Leica 8-18mm lens, used on a Panasonic G85. Too sharp. Too good to share.

I know so many of you are short of time during the holiday season so I'll keep this short and sweet. I'm mostly a portrait photographer and don't use wide angle lenses all that often. When I do it's usually because we're working with a commercial client on something like an annual report project where, in addition to portraits and photos of people working, we need shots of beautiful business interiors, majestic exterior shots and lenses that are wide enough to make a tiny lab look.....acceptable. I learned a long time ago that wide angles work best when there is something in the foreground, more stuff in the mid-ground and even more stuff in the background. We rarely go searching for "bokeh" when going wide. 

I did my research and decided that a micro four thirds system, built around the Panasonic GH5, would best suit my varied needs (video, portraits, general business photography) and I invested in it completely this year. The 40-150mm f2.8 was a "no-brainer" purchase given its incredible performance and nearly perfect focal length range for me. 40mm-60mm is perfect for portraits while the 60-150mm is perfect for documenting live theater at Zach Theatre here in Austin, Texas. 

The 12-100mm was a leap of faith. I'd read so many good and great things about it that I decided to try it out as my "all purpose" working lens. It's a constant aperture f4.0 which is great for most stuff. I'm happy I took the plunge because it very sharp at all focal lengths and all the other characteristics which people worry about are equally well handled.

For a week or so I thought that the short end of the 12-100mm would handle most of my wide angle needs but a job came along that required a bit wider field of view. I started researching the available wide angles in earnest. I wanted a zoom, and, after my experiences with the Olympus Pro series lenses, I knew I wanted to look at the top of the range of what is available. The advantages of premium glass are, if anything, even more obvious with the smaller sensor cameras....

I had previously owned the Pansonic 7-14mm f4.0 and had some niggling criticisms of it. The corners weren't perfect and the bulbous front made any sort of convenient filtering impossible. I've read amazing things about the Olympus 7-14mm f2.8 Pro so I tried that lens on loan. It's fabulous! Maybe even a little bit better than the lens I ended up with but for a photographer who

Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro on the Panasonic GH5 to document a holiday theatrical production. How's that working out?

Scrooge and the Ghost of Jacob Marley get the party started in Zach

Theatre's amazingly modern version of "A Christmas Carol."

(Actors: Harvey Guion and Roderick Sanford)

The holidays are upon us. Run for your lives...
Just kidding, just kidding. I'm recovering from my second "running shoot" of Zach Theatre's amazingly fun version of the old Charles Dickens play, "A Christmas Carol." This not our parent's take on Dickens. No, this version is peppered with comedic moments, hit, contemporary music ("Shut up and dance with Me" Madonna's "Holiday," and plenty more) as well as great choreography and some of the best stage lighting anywhere. I mean, come on, Dickens with disco balls? Perfect.

If you live in Austin and you don't go you'll miss something fun, heartwarming and so thoroughly profession in its production that you'll take note for future photo or video shoots.

I'm photographing the big productions in the Topfer Theatre in two stages. I shoot during the "tech" rehearsals on Sunday nights to get lots of angle from close to the stage. I also go to learn the tempo of the production. To see just where the finales of each number end up and to get a handle on the blocking. It helps, when shooting the dress rehearsal, to know where the actors

Snapshot from the film days. Beginning of Winter in Texas.

 Belinda and the Boy. Camera: Rollei 6008i.

It's just a couple of days till the Thanksgiving holiday here in the USA. In the past it meant endless football games on TV, too much food and lots of family friction for many people. The lucky ones had nice families who never fought and family members who could fix a perfect turkey with all the trimmings. They also sat around and read books or took naps after dinner and never thought of turning on the television. These families are mostly mythological....

Over the years various traditions have been added to the holiday. My least favorite until recently was the "Black Friday/Midnight on Thursday Shopping Hysteria." A prank by retailers who offer a limited number of "deals too good to be true" to lure in hordes of price sensitive shoppers determined to save money on stuff they might be better off without. 

In the Black Friday tradition we photo enthusiasts have recently been subjected to an added circle of hell; we've added the Photobloggers and Review Site Writers Top Ten Lists to the menu. To boost clicks they'll have cunning lists of the: The top cameras of the year! The top photo accessories of the year!! The top flash gear of the year!!! Lenses that will cause you to die if you do NOT own them!!!! and each site will feature their lists in the form of a daily countdown toward the number one item in each category. All with links to Amazon and B&H.

While most sites will choose the most popular photographic items in the hopes that their choices will drive the most click through sales from you, you can bet than Canon, Sony, Nikon and Olympus will be well represented on almost everyone's list. Everyone will, no doubt, toss in an inexpensive medium format camera as well. It's just the season for it.

Now, make no mistake, the writers are in no way representing that they have ever touched, seen or handled a lot of the gear in question. They might add a Leica to their list just to ramp up the perception that the writer is among the elite or cognoscenti of photography, but you can be sure there will be several budget DSLR cameras mixed in that have bigly selling potential as well. 

I plan on participating in my own eccentric way ( I am a photo blogger after all), but I'm going to give the holiday a break and not start into the list making until the first part of December. I'm only going to put stuff on my list that I've actually owned and used. It's going to be a shorter list this year. I might only have three top cameras on it. 

If we were all being honest we'd just write lists with top ten things for our fellow artists/photographers like: 

1. Plane tickets to someplace I've always wanted to photograph.

2. Extra cash for model fees so I can do that conceptual photo shoot I dreamed up.

3. Better coffee so I can enjoy being more awake while I post process files. (Wanna get me coffee for the holidays? Send me a can of Illy medium roast, pre-ground. I'm not much of a snob but this is my coffee of choice, you can get it on Amazon...hint to #1 son).

4. Some faster memory cards so I can make that video about Winter Masters Swimming at the 400 mb/s setting video setting.

5. More free time to walk around aimlessly and click a currently owned camera at random stuff that catches my eye(s). 

6. A season pass to local area art museums for the year so I can see every show without thinking I should just save on admission for the next great lens.

7. A gift of better discipline so I can finally spend the money on framed prints for my show instead of the next great lens.

8. A photo book full of absolutely false (but authoritatively written) reviews that laud pedestrian and affordable gear and trash high speed, state of the art gear, so I have more incentive to stick with gear that I can afford. Such a book would save marriages, budgets and countless hours of internet "research."  Chapter one: "The Panasonic 25mm f1.8 lens is the most under appreciated lens in the lens cosmos. With astringent sharpness even wide open it is peerless at every f-stop and defies completely the physics of diffraction...." 

9. A reverse switch for major internet sites so you could deliver a shock to bloggers who write inane stuff about new gear without having so much as changed a battery in the "reviewed" item. Also a trapdoor for the gaggle of bloggers that want to keep arguing the Jpeg v. Raw war well into the middle of the century...

10. A mute switch for the big sites who profess to have an "on staff" physicist who tries to prove just how many angels can dance naked on the head of a pin while pushing camels through the eye of a needle in order to justify writing 19 articles in one week about a newly introduced wundercamera. All without any rhyme or reason. Let me hear you save Nyqvist just one more time on your way to describing the hermeneutics of aperture equivalence....or whatever your newest religion is...

Ah well. It's part of the new responsibility of being a photographer/consumer in 2017. I'd put a link to some product at the bottom of this but I'm currently engulfed by ennui...

.....take some time off. Read a good book. Take a photograph of something that actually interests you. And if someone who writes a blog tells you that "pros" only shot RAW then metaphorically punch them in the face with a withering comment...and be sure to post it anonymously. Always pisses me off....

The Weekly "De-Brief" with the Panasonic/Leica/Olympus System. Thumbs Way Up.

I was already booked to photograph the technical rehearsal of Zach Theatre's rock-and-roll version of "A Christmas Carol" when I got a panicky call from one of the technical crew. Several principal actors would be subbing out their roles for several days in the first few weeks of the show. Sudden schedule conflicts!!! There were several actors who could fill the roles but they haven't been in all the rehearsals and might be hazy on choreography. Could I set up a central video camera to record the whole show from beginning to end so the fill-ins could watch the video over and over again to see the blocking they needed to know? 

I added a Panasonic FZ2500 to the kit, along with a stout tripod, and headed to the theater to set up. 

In MP4 at HD the camera can shoot fairly small files. They are about 20 mb/s which means that a 128 GB memory card will give nearly six hours of run time. I set the exposure based on a middle of the road lighting cue, white balanced the camera and then turned the rear screen in to shut off the review and gain me some battery life. We rolled the camera for the entire 2 hours of the technical performance on one battery!!!!!!

With the camera manually focused on the middle of the stage the depth of field was adequate to cover most of the stage from front to back. The camera delivered great files for the intended purpose. Exposure wasn't alway optimum but as a reference for the actors it was exactly what they needed. They can clearly see the blocking and gestures and their relationships to other actors on the stage. Easy to accommodate and a big help to my Zach family. 

At the end of the performance we downloaded the SD card directly to one of the production team's laptops and it ran in Windows Media Player without issue. For $1,000, or thereabouts every pro practicing a hybrid video+photo model should have one of these Swiss Army Knife cameras.

I wanted to bring the discussion of doing a profitable business with a team of small sensor cameras out of the studios of full time YouTubers and breathless DP Reviewers and just tell you my experiences over the last ten days...

"Memory is getting so cheap these days that file size doesn't matter any more." LMAO, ROTFL,

Behind the scenes at a three camera interview.

We decided to shoot a video project with multiple GH5s over the last two days. We also decide to shoot in 4K and to shoot 10 bit and 4:2:2. If you do that you'll quickly find that while the GH5 camera is a robust and stable platform it does demand fast memory cards in order to push through high density video signals. I'd been using UHS-1, class 10 cards with 95mbs write times but found out the hard way that once you go with big files your SD memory card speed has to upgrade with you...

Here's what I learned: You can get away with using slower cards in certain situations. If the camera doesn't move. If the talent doesn't move very much. If you don't shoot stopped way down (which vastly increases the detail in video files, increasing dynamic file size) and if you aren't recording with all the available camera bells and whistles on. If you are running next to a subject who is also running and you are shooting at f16 and you have image stabilization engaged. Your crappy UHS-1 card will sooner or later generate a camera screen message that says "Recording was cancelled due to slow card write..." Or something like that. 

What other things stress the system? Well, how about automatic diffraction compensation? Better to just shy away from apertures smaller than f8 and to keep this control off. Same for corner shading compensation. Just click "no." Some of the bells and whistles slow the whole process because the internal processors have more to do but the biggest culprit is cards that just can't suck up data fast enough. And, since you paid for all those other features you might feel entitled to use them....

In that case it is incumbent on you to supply your previously deprived camera system with a kick-ass fast SD card. If you are planning to take advantage of everything the GH5s have to offer you might use in-camera, 400 mb/s, All-I files as the gold standard to shoot for as a performance target. To play on this playground you are going to need a card with the following attributes: It should be a UHS-II card. That means it will have a second row of gold electrical contacts just below the usual UHS-I contact configuration. The UHS-II cards are speedier at reading and writing (anyone want to explain the technical reasons? We've got room in the comments....). The card should have a V90 rating. This is, as far as I know, the top rating for current SD cards. Oh, and you'll need a write time about 3-4X faster than a really good "Extreme" UHS-I card. Ready, set, let's drop $100 per card for 64 Gigabytes.... Or $278 for a 128 GB card...

The $100 price tag is just about double the price of previous generation of 64 Gb cards which  I purchased. So maybe memory isn't quite as cheap as the pundits proclaim....

But wait! There's more! Each GH5 comes with two card slots and unlike some of their less well spec'd brethren both of the slots are UHS-II ready. This means that if you are using two cards for simultaneous back-ups your camera can only write as fast as the slowest card can accommodate. This means that in practice you'll want/need to have a V90 UHS-II card in both slots. Now you have $200 per camera for basically the same 64 GB. Shooting three cameras deep and begging for simultaneous back-up? That's three cameras X $200 per camera or about $600 for a little over thirty minutes of 400 mb/s All-I shooting. That's $1200 per hour. More or less. Thank goodness the cards are re-usable. 

We opted for a lower intensity codec on this project. One with an average throughput of 150 mb/s. But a faster card makes for a more responsive camera system whether you are shooting big video files or slamming through a bunch of raw photo files. The faster the card the better advantage you can take of a big, fast buffer. After all, you paid for it....

Even if you never shoot a lick of video a good UHS-II card with a fast rating will make your raw+jpeg shooting Texas Jackrabbit fast. Even as it puts your credit card on a hard diet...

I'm using a combination of Delkin 128 GB, V60 cards and two Hoodman 64 GB, V90 cards at the moment. I'm sure it's advertising bravado but Hoodman labels them as 2000X cards. 8K, ultraHD capable. Guess if I want to be a really serious pro I should buy another handful...

I'd buy the 128 GB cards but they're way too pricey...