> I'm having trouble seeing the mosquito on the lower left side.
It was chomping away on my shin.
> Still would be interesting to see comparison with that camera. I find
> mountainscapes tricky to really frame well. The feeling of looking down or up
> often gets lost. The scale of things is hard to capture.
I've been doing some head-to-head testing of the three different long
zooms: Lumix 45-150, the ZD 40-150 lens, and the ZD 50-200. For these
tests, I've used the GX85 for all three to compare one lens against
the other, and also the lenses on their native bodies. Overall, the ZD
40-150 is a sharper lens than the Lumix 45-150 and does not vignette
as much. But the Lumix obviously performs better on the GX85. The ZD
50-200 maintains excellent sharpness at most apertures, but does not
exhibit the vignetting of either of the other two lenses. When shot at
same aperture (F8 to F11 is typical for my photography with these
focal lengths), the lenses maintain differences. But not always. I can
find plenty of pictures that are either identical or actually reverse
of what you would think, and plenty of pictures to reinforce the
thesis.
I'm reminded of a trait of the ZD 14-54 Mk1 lens. It really is a
brilliant lens, but there are two focal lengths, combined with
aperture and subject distance that seem to completely suck the life
out of the photographs. Dimensionality is lost and on rare occasions
the subject has the unusual trait of looking like it is behind or
inside the background. It's usually pretty easy to recover in the
computer, but as you are going through a set of images from an event,
all of a sudden you feel like your eyeballs are being sucked into your
skull as recoil from the image that just doesn't look right. I mention
this because I suspect the Lumix 45-150 falls into this same trap.
Somewhere between 125 and 150mm, the images just lose some life. While
I can, and do, make up for it in Lightroom, it's something that needs
to be fixed, whereas the other lenses keep the dance going.
The mountainscape angle of capture is definitely a challenge for me
too. How do you capture the steepness of the trail? How do you capture
an image that strikes fear into the hearts of the viewer? There are a
few tricks of the trade, but then something else is compromised.
BTW, my personal limit on steepness for a trail (without safety
equipment) is when you stand straight up, stick your arm out and
you're touching the mountain. Last weekend's climb up Mt. Magnificent
had a couple of spots where I made an exception only because there
were a couple of cute girls there that I didn't want to embarrass
myself in front of.
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
AG Schnozz
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