Lumix G1 and 75mm f2.5 Summarit shoot guitar master class

[Tuolumne]

I shot a guitar master class yesterday that was taught by Maestro Yasha Kofman. Since my Rayqual M adapter arrived last week I decided to shoot the entire thing with my Lumix G1 and the Summarit 75mm f2.5 lens (35mm efl of 150mm). This made for a great telephoto combination, shooting at a distance of about 75 feet from the stage.

I mounted the camera on a tripod, opened the swiveling viewing screen, sat down, focused and shot. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, and I was very pleased with the results. Focusing was incredibly easy with this combination of body and lens. I do wish Panasonic would fix its firmware so you don't have to press two buttons to put the camera in manual focus magnification mode. There is a "Fn" button that could be assigned this role with a single press, but the firmware doesn't support that yet. Panasonic, are you listening?

All of these JPG shots were done at ISO400, 1/30 sec, f4. I did not apply any post-processing noise reduction, since I did not feel the out-of-camera JPGs required it. They did, however, get my standard Picasa workflow of:

"I'm feeling lucky"
One button auto-color
One button sharpen

That's pretty much what every JPG gets from me. I found the long lens on a tripod very easy to use. I have done only a little bit of experimentation with shorter lenses, so I will reserve comment on them for later.

/T
P.S. These colors are amazingly true to what I saw with my eye, or at least my memory of that.

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

Ha ha!, I love this one:

Really nice shots!

 

[Tuolumne]

^^
Could it be Gene Wilder disguised as a guitarist? Perhaps an out take from Blazing Saddles?😀

/T

 

[RayPA]

good job. nice to see these. yeah, I'm liking what I'm seeing with the kit lens and can hardly wait for the adapter!


/

 

[victoriapio]

I love the Summarit on the M8, but must admit the lens (without IR/UV cut filter I assume) looks absolutely awesome, with natural color and saturation for untouched jpgs. And some of the images are quite fascinating.

Nice, very nice ...

 

[Tuolumne]

I love the Summarit on the M8, but must admit the lens (without IR/UV cut filter I assume) looks absolutely awesome, with natural color and saturation for untouched jpgs. And some of the images are quite fascinating.

Nice, very nice ...

I went back and compared these shots with these taken at a Steven Isserlis cello master class the previous month. Same venue, same lighting, photos taken from the same control booth. The cello master class photos were taken with the G1 kit lens. I think you can see that the f2.5 Summarit did significantly better than the kit lens for a number of reasons:

1) The Summarit's efl of 150mm is much longer than the kit len's max efl of 90mm, so much less cropping had to be done to the guitar master class photos.

2) The kits lens is very slow at 90mm (f5.6 I think), so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO to get a fast enough shutter speed to freeze action. 1600 ISO images are much noisier on the G1 than 400 ISO, which the guitar master class was shot at. So, I had to use Noise Ninja in post-processing the cello shots.

3) Given the above differences, it's hard to know how much each lens contributed intrinsically to the final image, but the Summarit certainly seems to have superior contrast, sharpness and saturation over the kit lens. I especially like the colors the Summarit captured. Soft pastels for the walls and wooden floor, but bright well saturated colors where any existed. The pearlized finish on some of the guitars seems especially well rendered.

BTW, I forgot to remove the UV/IR filter for this shoot, so it was on the Summarit the whole time.

/T

 

[bmattock]

Real guitars have twin humbuckers attached to a solid body. I'm just saying.

 

[splitimageview]

Very nice photos. I picked up a 70/2 Pen F lens to use on the G1, hopefully the results will be near the quality of the Summarit. 🙂

 

[Prosaic]

Bet these would have looked georgeous on film.
Colors look pretty poor on the G1. (I am not even talking about blown highlights everywhere...)

 

[splitimageview]

In Pop Photo's test (including G1, Canon 5D MkII, Canon 50D, Rebel, Nikon D3, D700, D300, D90, D60, Pentax 20D, Sony A900, A700, A300, Olympus E3 and E520) the G1 scored highest in color accuracy. No digital will have the dynamic range of film.

 

[Ron (Netherlands)]

Some excellent shots there!

 

[Tuolumne]

Bet these would have looked georgeous on film.
Colors look pretty poor on the G1. (I am not even talking about blown highlights everywhere...)

Colors look good to me! And I was there.
As for the blown highlights, that was deliberate, and they don't bother me at all. I have found digital noise increases at high ISO, especially if the scene is under exposed at all. So I always try to slightly over expose shots taken at ISO 800 and above. I'd rather have a few blown highlights than the digital noise that underexposure creates.

/T