Avotius
Some guy
First I will show 4 photos selected from yesterdays outing with my comments, then will talk about the experience using the camera and lenses.
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Cultural Heritage vs. Money
This is…or was an official protected cultural heritage site, now it is just the next neighborhood in Chongqing to end up in the way of yet another apartment complex. The man walking through the rubble is surveying the demolition while balancing himself on one of the ancient stone tablets, one of seven that have been severely damaged over the years and even more so recently by debris.
It is infuriating to see how little regard the Chinese have for their own history and culture unless they are trying to use it to make money or win an argument. Even more unfortunate are the apartments that will be built here without a doubt will be like the others in this city that have sprung up over the last 5 years. Low quality, soulless, and within 2 years of being built totally neglected and smelling of urine around the walls.
Keeping a good eye out
This guy is making sure that people don’t get in through the perimeter, the one I’m standing on the other side of. I had to get in so I could see what has become of the cultural heritage site in this neighborhood, to my dismay most of it was rubble under my feet.
Taking the trees
The neighborhood is coming down, and since all of the trees inside the city of Chongqing are transplanted no one will miss them when the new buildings are put up. So in a city with a visibility range of about half a kilometer it seems almost fitting that the trees will be scrapped just like everything else of use that can be found. Green is not a color that lasts long here, even the grass in gray in this city. The workers who perform this destruction don’t have much choice though as morals are something they simply cannot afford on a budget of a couple hundred Yuan a month.
Little left
This man and his wife used to have a small one room home right behind this wall, now all that remain are bricks and a small makeshift stove made from what used to be the walls of their house. This man said he and his wife did not receive enough money to buy another home when theirs was torn down so now they can only squat in a friends shop in a neighborhood a few kilometers away. His wife sold Oranges in the local market as he did manual labor with the clothes on his back barely hanging on by a few loose threads sewn together.
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The camera used here was a Panasonic G1 with the jinfinance adapter and the Zeiss 28mm f2.8 ZM lens. The camera on it's first outing worked quite well and was very responsive and rarely in my way. Being the first time out there were a few things that I have not sorted out yet, like how to extract maximum image quality from it. The g1 is really small and I wondered if it would be a little clumsy to use because of that but I am happy to find that in the real world I never gave the size of the camera another thought. Nor was it too heavy so was not a strain and was very tactile.
The area I was shooting in was being torn down so there was considerable dust everywhere. I was changing lenses between my Zeiss 28mm and Zeiss 50mm every once in a while and once forgot to turn the camera off which means the sensor was exposed while being on, yet after all this there was not dust to be found on the sensor and not spots on the images. Next time I will take the kit lens out and give that a try especially because of reasons I will state later.
The adapter seems to work ok, my Zeiss 28mm lens is not as worn in as my 50mm lens and the adapter has some play on the m4/3 mount side which means when focusing the adapter would move back and forth a hair which is slightly annoying though did not mar overall use. The Zeiss 50mm f2 lens worked really well and was fun to use as well.
The G1 is sort of an enigma of a camera. When it comes to image quality, I think my old Canon 20D would stomp this thing, especially when it comes to noise as even at ISO 400 there was very visible noise in the image that would show up in a decent sized print. The images do have that potential to print well like a DSLR but the images are very "digital", maybe even more so then any other camera I have used. The images, even the raw ones have all sorts of digital artifacts. It remains to be seen how these artifacts will effect the image when printed, we will see later when I put some pictures on paper.
Manual focus on this camera was...ok. It seems that I still had a lot of images out of focus despite ample shutter speed and f8 aperture at longer distances. As it was the first time out using this type of set up I will for now just call this user error, especially as most of the way through the day I noticed I could make the image area in the finder larger using the custom menu option "LVF DISP. STYLE" which is a must as far as im concerned for anyone who will be using this camera for manual focus.
One thing that I noticed on this camera that is just plain stupid design is the infrared focus assist lamp is in the worst possible place on the camera. When using the kit lens with hood, the hood blocks about 30% of the beam and when I have my hand on the zoom part of the lens in the ready position my thumb completely blocks the beam, not to mention what happens if you hold the camera for vertical shooting and your entire hand is in front of the beam.
I have not had enough experience with the camera to speak about how well the qualities of the lenses transfer over. In a couple shots shot at 2.0 or 2.8 you could see the out of focus rendering of the Zeiss lenses in all their typical Zeissness. As for colors and rendering that remains to be seen, some qualities have transferred to digital but the other I have yet to be able to extract. Also I have vintage Leica lenses here to play with black and white with this camera later on and will follow up then.
Overall from the first day it seems positive, my girlfriend already offered to trade her Canon 5D for my G1 so it must do something right. Either way I think it will make a fine camera that will supplement my film shooting M's.
=====================
Cultural Heritage vs. Money
This is…or was an official protected cultural heritage site, now it is just the next neighborhood in Chongqing to end up in the way of yet another apartment complex. The man walking through the rubble is surveying the demolition while balancing himself on one of the ancient stone tablets, one of seven that have been severely damaged over the years and even more so recently by debris.
It is infuriating to see how little regard the Chinese have for their own history and culture unless they are trying to use it to make money or win an argument. Even more unfortunate are the apartments that will be built here without a doubt will be like the others in this city that have sprung up over the last 5 years. Low quality, soulless, and within 2 years of being built totally neglected and smelling of urine around the walls.
Keeping a good eye out
This guy is making sure that people don’t get in through the perimeter, the one I’m standing on the other side of. I had to get in so I could see what has become of the cultural heritage site in this neighborhood, to my dismay most of it was rubble under my feet.
Taking the trees
The neighborhood is coming down, and since all of the trees inside the city of Chongqing are transplanted no one will miss them when the new buildings are put up. So in a city with a visibility range of about half a kilometer it seems almost fitting that the trees will be scrapped just like everything else of use that can be found. Green is not a color that lasts long here, even the grass in gray in this city. The workers who perform this destruction don’t have much choice though as morals are something they simply cannot afford on a budget of a couple hundred Yuan a month.
Little left
This man and his wife used to have a small one room home right behind this wall, now all that remain are bricks and a small makeshift stove made from what used to be the walls of their house. This man said he and his wife did not receive enough money to buy another home when theirs was torn down so now they can only squat in a friends shop in a neighborhood a few kilometers away. His wife sold Oranges in the local market as he did manual labor with the clothes on his back barely hanging on by a few loose threads sewn together.
=====================
The camera used here was a Panasonic G1 with the jinfinance adapter and the Zeiss 28mm f2.8 ZM lens. The camera on it's first outing worked quite well and was very responsive and rarely in my way. Being the first time out there were a few things that I have not sorted out yet, like how to extract maximum image quality from it. The g1 is really small and I wondered if it would be a little clumsy to use because of that but I am happy to find that in the real world I never gave the size of the camera another thought. Nor was it too heavy so was not a strain and was very tactile.
The area I was shooting in was being torn down so there was considerable dust everywhere. I was changing lenses between my Zeiss 28mm and Zeiss 50mm every once in a while and once forgot to turn the camera off which means the sensor was exposed while being on, yet after all this there was not dust to be found on the sensor and not spots on the images. Next time I will take the kit lens out and give that a try especially because of reasons I will state later.
The adapter seems to work ok, my Zeiss 28mm lens is not as worn in as my 50mm lens and the adapter has some play on the m4/3 mount side which means when focusing the adapter would move back and forth a hair which is slightly annoying though did not mar overall use. The Zeiss 50mm f2 lens worked really well and was fun to use as well.
The G1 is sort of an enigma of a camera. When it comes to image quality, I think my old Canon 20D would stomp this thing, especially when it comes to noise as even at ISO 400 there was very visible noise in the image that would show up in a decent sized print. The images do have that potential to print well like a DSLR but the images are very "digital", maybe even more so then any other camera I have used. The images, even the raw ones have all sorts of digital artifacts. It remains to be seen how these artifacts will effect the image when printed, we will see later when I put some pictures on paper.
Manual focus on this camera was...ok. It seems that I still had a lot of images out of focus despite ample shutter speed and f8 aperture at longer distances. As it was the first time out using this type of set up I will for now just call this user error, especially as most of the way through the day I noticed I could make the image area in the finder larger using the custom menu option "LVF DISP. STYLE" which is a must as far as im concerned for anyone who will be using this camera for manual focus.
One thing that I noticed on this camera that is just plain stupid design is the infrared focus assist lamp is in the worst possible place on the camera. When using the kit lens with hood, the hood blocks about 30% of the beam and when I have my hand on the zoom part of the lens in the ready position my thumb completely blocks the beam, not to mention what happens if you hold the camera for vertical shooting and your entire hand is in front of the beam.
I have not had enough experience with the camera to speak about how well the qualities of the lenses transfer over. In a couple shots shot at 2.0 or 2.8 you could see the out of focus rendering of the Zeiss lenses in all their typical Zeissness. As for colors and rendering that remains to be seen, some qualities have transferred to digital but the other I have yet to be able to extract. Also I have vintage Leica lenses here to play with black and white with this camera later on and will follow up then.
Overall from the first day it seems positive, my girlfriend already offered to trade her Canon 5D for my G1 so it must do something right. Either way I think it will make a fine camera that will supplement my film shooting M's.
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