entropic remnants
Hall of Famer
- Name
- John Griggs
Just got my LX7 today and boy do I love it already.
But my intention is to carry it everywhere and a "what if" scenario came to mind: What if I get a sudden opportunity to shoot an old factory somewhere and I don't have my wonderful E-M5 or E-PL5? What if all I have is the LX7 and the tripod that's always in the trunk.
Since long exposures in near darkness are a normal challenge in urbex, how would the LX7 do? Here's some things I discovered:
That's nothing short of some very good thought on the part of Panasonic. Here's the conditions of my test:
After the informative count downs I took the RAW file into Lightroom 4.4RC (my normal process, well, was 4.3 before) and I did almost no adjustments. First of all here's something: the metering was right on. Perfect even when working is such dim light.
I did some sharpening and added a little contrast and that's about it. I didn't try to really edit this down like I might one of my art shots.
Here's the resulting shot, followed by a 100% crop of the focus area (click for larger view):
Notice you can actually see aliasing in the cloth of the left puppet. That's sharp.
To me this looks excellent and shows me I could use the little LX7 in a pinch for something like that. I used to shoot 10mp urbex with my D60, D80 and D200 cameras with no problems. This is clean enough that used with care I could reproduce that work with this little camera.
I do indeed like the LX7.
But my intention is to carry it everywhere and a "what if" scenario came to mind: What if I get a sudden opportunity to shoot an old factory somewhere and I don't have my wonderful E-M5 or E-PL5? What if all I have is the LX7 and the tripod that's always in the trunk.
Since long exposures in near darkness are a normal challenge in urbex, how would the LX7 do? Here's some things I discovered:
- I had not read the specs but I discovered that the LX7 can do exposures up to 250 seconds without bulb! That's 4 minutes and 10 seconds! That's unprecedented as most of my higher level cameras don't go there.
- The LX7 does do "dark frame subtraction" where an exposure with the shutter closed of equal length to the subject exposure is done. Then any "hot pixel" information is subtracted from the subject exposure to remove hot pixels.
- The camera does not seem to heat up during the process.
- The entire long exposure counts down on the display, then the dark frame does the same thing in a "pop up box". You always know where you are in the cycle.
That's nothing short of some very good thought on the part of Panasonic. Here's the conditions of my test:
- Turned off my workshop lights and it was very dim, lit only by light trickling in from the main house.
- Mounted the camera on a tripod
- I left the image stabilizer on to see what would happen. I would redo the test if it interfered... but it didn't.
- Put the mode dial in Manual, left the camera at 24mm
- Switched in the ND filter on (another nice touch, the built in ND filter) to further diminish the light for the test.
- I kept cranking the shutter time until it topped out at 250 seconds, then adjusted the aperture until the exposure graph showed zero (f/2.5). This means the metering was working in this dim situation.
- I had the AF illuminator off and AF could not lock. I used a flashlight to get AF lock (something I often do when shooting in old factories as well).
- Triggered the shutter
After the informative count downs I took the RAW file into Lightroom 4.4RC (my normal process, well, was 4.3 before) and I did almost no adjustments. First of all here's something: the metering was right on. Perfect even when working is such dim light.
I did some sharpening and added a little contrast and that's about it. I didn't try to really edit this down like I might one of my art shots.
Here's the resulting shot, followed by a 100% crop of the focus area (click for larger view):
Notice you can actually see aliasing in the cloth of the left puppet. That's sharp.
To me this looks excellent and shows me I could use the little LX7 in a pinch for something like that. I used to shoot 10mp urbex with my D60, D80 and D200 cameras with no problems. This is clean enough that used with care I could reproduce that work with this little camera.
I do indeed like the LX7.