Friday, October 23, 2015

The colors of this industrial autumn

It starts to be the dark season once again. The length of day is still almost 9 1/2 hours, so it is not that bad, but when the leaves fall off trees, the landscape becomes much more dark. Today it rained, and the bicycle got extremely dirty. It was also slippery because of wet leaves covering the road surface.

I have taken over 60,000 photographs with the Panasonic LX100. That is quite little compared to the 400,000 photographs taken with the LX3/LX5, but it is still quite a lot for one year. I got my hands on the LX100 on October 31st, 2014, and it has been mostly good.

Well, there have been some disappointments as well. One of these is the macro mode, which quite often focuses on the background if the subject in front doesn't cover enough of the area. When taking pictures of plants etc., it is often required to first focus on something larger at the same distance, for example the hand, and then point the camera to the subject.

Another disappointment is the rear dial around the four-way controller in the back of the camera. It has stopped working properly; either it doesn't work at all, or then it works too eagerly. In a way this is not a new thing, as I had a similar problem with the LX5. The click wheel stopped working, probably due to dust.

With the LX100 the rear dial has become sometimes unresponsive, or then extremely sensitive to movement, so that it jumps to a random position when one touches it even a little bit. So, it is almost impossible to use it for changing settings, and one easily changes some settings when touching the dial by accident. For example, when using the P mode, one changes the combination of aperture and shutter speed via the rear dial, and these setting easily get changed by mistake.

(Posting title is from the poem The Waste Carpet by William Matthews.)

2 comments:

Markus said...

Fine images, Juha - the light arcs in #1 are delicate and delicious, better viewed enlarged from flickr. And you remind me that there's more than the narrow goal of always getting sharp images.

It's a pity that the LX-100 already shows signs of wear and tear - for a camera in that price range, 60.000 exposures shouldn't be the limit. Besides personal reasons I dislike this development from a broader ecological perspective, too: it just trains us to accept the throwaway society as being normal, which it isn't.

In this sense I also feel that the asked price for the new mirror-free Leica is not adequate: The old mechanical Leicas for similar prices work for 30 years and more, but the SL as an all-electronci gadget will not see this lifespan.

Juha Haataja said...

Well, the rear dial isn't causing problems all the time, only occasionally, but still that spoils the feeling of reliability. On the other hand, sometimes this causes positive surprises, for example when the aperture changed from f/1.7 to f/16, and exposure similarly, and I caught plenty of creative motion blur in the photographs, even though the original intention was to eliminate shake.