R. Doug Wicker — Author

Fortunately another sunset presented itself a few days after the images I presented to you on Wednesday. And being brighter, I was able to decrease the ISO for less noise and increase the shutterspeed. For instance, the above image was taken at ISO 320 rather than Wednesday’s ISO 3200. Shutterspeed was 1/60th, as opposed to Wednesday’s 1/20th.

The above out-of-the-camera JPEG was cropped and subjected to some increased saturation. Other than that, nothing was done to reduce noise or enhance sharpness. You can see that noise is considerable less than was evident in Wednesday’s ISO 3200 images.

Above is another image of the same sunset taken at a slightly wider 28mm focal length. Again, not bad, and much better than the results at 3200.

Now for something for which I held little hope.. Four days after today’s sunset images were snapped, I decided to try something really extreme. I aimed at the Moon, handheld, and let the camera set the exposure. The initial image looked promising, much more than I originally expected:

You may be asking, how did I manage to get 1,320mm out of a 1,200mm lens? Well, the FZ80D has a feature I found useful on my much older ZS3 and ZS6 cameras, but which was missing on my FZ1000. This is the i.Zoom feature, which crops the image to appear that you’re using a longer zoom, then internally processes the image to resize it to the full size (i.e., megapixel count) of the sensor. I’ve always been amazed at how Panasonic does this so that it emulates a longer zoom even though it’s really a cropped image. However Panasonic managed this bit of magic, it definitely works. This is the above image, cropped and then tweaked to darken the shadows:

I’m contemplating sending in my old, trusty FZ1000 for some refurbishment, but in the meantime the FZ80D will have to do. There are a few features I gain in the transition, such as i.Zoom, and others that I will miss, such as in-camera processed panoramas. I’ll also miss the FZ1000’s larger sensor with reduced noise at higher ISOs and slightly better resolution. But the FZ80D’s 20-1200mm zoom so far leads me to believe that I may be gaining more than I lost.

I’ll know better after our next journey.

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