Thread: GH2 with Panasonic lenses - results

I have been using a GH2 for 5 months and used it for two extended hiking trips. Much of my use is for landscapes in area where I carry more than 1 weeks food plus tent and other hiking gear. Weight is a major consideration although I do want the best optical quality that light weight will allow. Hence why I decided to try out the GH2 and the panny lenses this year. My wife also got a GH2 with the 14-140 zoom as she does not like changing lenses very often.

Overall, much lighter than carryng a Nikon SLR set, simply fantastic.
The smaller size also means I can carry all my gear in a shoulder bag and have pretty quick access to all of it and thats a big improvement as well. The set includes a 7-14, 14-45, 45-200 plus the Leica 45mm. here are my comments on each.

Optical quality, I am very impressed with the 7-14mm Panasonic zoom. Pretty much the same as my previous Nikon equivalent lens except its half the size and 1/3 of the weight. Most of the time has great contrast and definition, have little to criticise, its my favourite and thats great as I tend to look for wide angle images. A minor problem is that sometimes gets tiny flare spots from sun but careful use of your other hand in the 7 to 10mm range can reduce this problem.

Panasonic 14-45 zoom, good lens for mid-range use, stop down one stop and it seems to be pretty good. Woudl be even better if it was say 2.8 to 3.5 f-stop range but I guess that would make it heavier.

45-200 Tend to mostly use it at the 200mm end and I suspect thats what many would do. If you have good light it can give great results, if the light is flat then the result can look soft (even when braced etc). Have got some good results of ghost gums with it but overall its not fantastic. As all the long m43 lenses seem similar at the moment at long telephoto lengths I guess we just have to wait and see if the manufactuers wil give us something with a wider f stop thats optimised for the longest focal length rather than the shorter end as they seem to be. Hint - design for the LONGEST focal length and compromise on the rest.

45 macro. Some think this is not a great lens. Yes it is quirky to use and focusiing on close up objects can be difficult but then there are not many choices. When it wont focus closeup, I have found the way around it is to switch it over to manual focus, focus roughly manually then turn back to auto focus and the camera seems to remember you are focusiing very close. It then works prfectly and does a better job closeup than I can do manualy. Capable of producing really great macro photos once you work out how to use it. We have taken many imagesof fungi in dark forests on rainy days and most of them were excellent. Compared to my Nikomn Macro lens, its just as good, as the Nikon only ever focussed to half frame size, its actually superior as it goes down to 1:1, the Nikon was also tricky to focus near the limit of its focussing range as well so dont expect macro to be really easy, you need some patience.

14-140 Personally I thought this would be a typical 10x zoom, soft. It surprised me and its actually a great lens. Only problem is its no longer a 'small camera' but then have you seen a 10x zoom on a Nikon or canon SLR, they make the 14-140 look tiny! Its even reasonable when used for flower photography (where the corners dont matter), yes it wont go in real close like the 45mm but as a single lens it really does a great job. Sometimes wide contrast ranges can fool it and the odd image is then a dud but for 95% of images its excellent.

GH2 - as a camera, has its quirks like all of them. The most annoying this is its easy to turn some of the dials when pulling the camera out of a bag - you soon get used to checking these. You also have to be careful to hold it correctly so you dont keep touching some of the buttons. Overall it is pretty well thought out and easier than the Nikon layouts. The programmable function buttons are great although it would be even better if they allowed ANY menu feature to be placed onto a programmable button. Battery life, about the same as the Canon G10 and other compact cameras, it did take some time to get spare batteries. Would I like a bigger battery, actually no. Its more convenient to keep the body weight down and keep the extra battery weight in the spares bag rather than having it all day in your hand. Swapping batteries is trivial, just make sure you order some when you order a camera. Note we also tried some of the 'generic batteries'. yes they are cheap but they only gave half the shots (200) of the panny battery (400 shots) and after several uses that numebr is starting to rop so dont bother with them. They are cheaply priced and seem tobe cheaply made as well.

As for qualit of the sensor and optics compared to my Nikons. Yes it is a touch less but for most use is not noticeable. If pixel peeping, yes there is some softness compared to the Nikon but if you look at images aorund 8 to 10M in size they look very clear and sharp. guess 16M is pushing it for sharpness for M43. So what do I do when I want a poster size image. Simple, I take one witht he 7-14 zoom then with a longer lens I take a series of images and merge the panorama together. Free programs give you a one dimensional merge but some of the better program allow a 2 dimensional merge. As the GH2 can take images vey quickly, you simply fire off the panorama sequence very quickly. With images of say 6 wide x 2 high, I make a 100M panorama image then downsample that to 50 to 60M and end up with a sharp poster sized print. Who needs large format or larger cameras for travel or hiking. Yes you need to be careful how you take panormas but you soon learn how to do it (rotate the camera, not the person holding it) and most of the time can get great results.

As for how we use our images, they get used in magazines and commercial printing (off-set printing) where 300dpi is required. The m43 is more than adequate for such use.

I hope this is useful to some readers.

Thanks for the report. I have the three Panasonic zooms that I use with a G1 body and have been satisfied with their performance, especially the 7-14. I'm interested in trying your panorama approach for high-res landscapes. Would the 20mm 1.7 be a good choice for the lens to use? I also have 50mm and 85mm, but am guessing they may be too long focal length for a typical landscape pano.

The 20mm would be perfect for panos. I have created panos with several previous cameras as well and in 35mm terms you tend to use lenses from around 30 to 50mm. I have seen very good results using 80 to 100mm but they are panos with up to 200 images, you need a tripod and pano head as otherwise you would miss bits. all my panos have been handheld. Panos with lenses wider than 28mm are very hard for software to align correctly.

As its easy to miss bits I have found a good method is to take a series of images of the sky with the skyline just inside the image then take the next row with the skyline just inside the top of the frame. That way when they are stitched you will have some headway with cropping at the top and bottom of the frame. The images dont become rectangles when joined, rather they are semi-circular so you need some leeway to crop later. I now also go one frame (or half frame sometimes) extra each way in the width as its easy to crop off what you dont want later rather than lament that you are just a bit short once the pano mapping has happened.

Most of the time the automatic pano conversion works fine but sometimes you need to do some manual adjustment. Initially dont try panos with really closeup objects in the foreground, once your technique improves you can then add them in - the closer objects have more problems with alignment particularly if hand holding. Remember you need to rotate the camera around the sensor, not rotate it from your neck which causes mis-alignment.

Have fun, you can get some great results and as for the odd dud, you learn from those that you need to be more careful. I have sometimes taken the whole scene twice, create a pano with the lot then start deleting images until I get an image without ghosting, requires some experimenting but is one method to get around camera movement.

John

John:
I gave it a try yesterday evening with the 20mm on a tripod (no pano head, just the normal mount). I used the LCD display with grid lines, so it was pretty easy to set the overlap to about 1/6 of the frame. I took four shots in horizontal increments only. Panorama Maker software did the stitching It came out pretty well without any fine tuning required. The result was 25 MP. I'd like to make a print, but a long skinny photo is not that appealing to me so I think I'll wait till I do a horizontal+vertical to get a more normal aspect ratio result. Thanks for your suggestions. Maybe I'll post some results later.
:Al