Catching berries

Poisonberry, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

I posted earlier a photo of these same berries, taken with my old Ixus 400 which had quite a lot of trouble handling the highlights and constrast. For the LX3, this wasn't much of a problem - or it may be that I know better how to tackle this subject.

I'm now at 1510 photos taken with the LX3, the last hundred or so were testing my old external flash unit - our children were the subject of the testing. The flash unit worked nicely, producing a natural-looking lighting.

I don't know why my 25-year old cheap flash unit works so well with the LX3. Perhaps it is just a coincidence, perhaps it is the smart design of the camera.

I don't necessarily recommend wide testing of third-party flash units with the camera, because there might be incompatibilities in the electronics which might harm the camera. But I'm a bit of a curious nature so I just had to try it out.

One good aspect about the LX3 is the fast operation, especially with jpeg files. The camera responds well even when it is writing the files to memory, so you can change settings, compose, preview and so on and shoot at once when the file is saved. With RAW the writing times are longer, but otherwise it has no impact on the handling. And with jpegs you can keep on shooting photos one after another, fast enough for my purposes at least so far.

I also tried photography without the flash, and it worked quite nicely even in available lighting, except for the motion blur. I feel that children are the most difficult subject of photography, taking photos of them is even harder than in sports. And how hard can street photography be?