Zygoptera Macro
I went shooting with
Denosha and
Veloran using the Panasonic FZ28 at the Singapore Botanical Gardens on Saturday. Also brought along my Canon 5D and 100mm macro, but didn't use it in the end - perhaps being too lazy to do serious heavy duty shooting. Our favourite haunt for macros is a little man made pond (damselflies and dragon flies are relatively easy targets). On a previous trip, I had snagged a
damselfly with the 5D, so I wanted to see how the FZ28 would hold up in this kind of situation.
One advantage was the liveview on the LCD, as quite often the insects are perched on a hard to reach leaf in the pond. With a DLR you need to use the viewfinder - not always possible because that would mean standing in the pond (ok, I admit maybe my 5D is a bit old and liveview is now slowly appearing in the DSLR world). Another point to note is the ability to use the "joystick" to select the AF point was very useful. My old FZ20 didn't have such a feature and it makes it far easier to compose the scene.
Having a cropped sensor, I didn't need to worry about DOF - f/3.6 seems adequate, and allowed me to stick to ISO100 (noise therefore wasn't a big issue). However, comparing against the previous shot with the 5D, it's clear that a 18x do-it-all superzoom with macro isn't really resolving as much detail as a dedicated macro lens. The general shape of the damselfly is there, even the hairs on the leg and the eyes, but things like the texture of the body are smoothed over - and it's not due to excessive noise reduction. When viewed at 100% size, the compound eyes are not visible - Denosha in comparison managed to capture them with his DSLR. Overall, most photographers I suspect would be happy enough with the FZ28's performance.
The image above was generated from essentially the full resolution of the FZ28 - cropped at the top and bottom to fit into a 3:2 format. To fill the frame, the front of my FZ28's lens was literally only about 3cm away from the damselfly (lens hood removed of course!). To provide a level playing field to the 5D, it was shot in RAW format and developed in a similar fashion (i.e. my same eyes, judgment, software and level of skill) to the
earlier shot.
please be encouraging, talk more about the subject
looking for critically constructive comments, can go technical
happy to hear any and all comments (i.e. bring it on!!)
great shoot..so usefull info about you take it..thanks for share!