Saturday, December 3, 2011

Never seen by waking eyes

Today was a colder day, and we got finally some sunshine. We went for a walk in the Luukki forests, exploring forests and looking at swamps and lakes.

But this won't last long: during this night a storm will hit Finland, bring rain and strong winds.

I have written little about cameras recently, mainly because the LX5 works so well. I haven't resorted to shooting RAW, as the jpeg quality at ISO 500 is reasonably good, at least for me.

Andreas wrote an interesting posting about cameras (including the LX5), in which he covers a lot of ground - or to be more precise, different types of cameras.

Even though the LX5 is not perfect (as the LX3 before it), it is often surprisingly good. Well, most surprises are good with this camera, I should say. I have been rather impressed with the autofocus ability in dim light - I'm not using the autofocus assist lamp (it wouldn't help in landscape photography anyway), and still the LX5 usually focuses as fast as one would wish for.

There is one thing though, which I don't like, and which became apparent only recently when I started using a mini-tripod for long exposures.

The problem occurs if you are using the Auto LCD off setting. Namely, when I switch on the self-timer, and then start composing the shot, if the LCD off function activates, the LX5 forgets about the self-timer, and when you press a button, you have to reactivate the self-timer.

This is a nuisance. I have quite often pressed the shutter release button, and only then realized that the self-timer was not on. And when you are taking long exposures, you either have to wait for several seconds, or switch off and restart the camera.

4 comments:

Cedric said...

Just had to stop by to say that these six images are beautiful.

Just out of interest, have you ever taken shots of some particular scene during different times of the year. Like a tree or lake shot at different seasons from the same composition. I only ask because one of the things I like so much about your images is the change of feel that goes along with the change of seasons. Where I live in Brisbane Australia the scenery never changes other than for the appearance of flowers (which themselves, appear all year round).

Juha Haataja said...

@Cedric: I often visit the same places, but as I try not to rationalize, or even think anything while taking photographs, I don't have such "change of season" photographs. Each and every photograph is more or less spur-of-the-moment reaction, below thinking, or that at least is what I'm aiming for.

Cedric said...

I totally get that Juha. It's the best way to shoot. Precisely why I never succeed in shooting pre-planned projects :)

Juha Haataja said...

@Cedric: Indeed, preplanning seems never to help much. I have occasionally tried to use a theme, but that has soon fallen apart when something else interesting came up as a subject...