Tag Archives: R. Doug Wicker

Today I’m going to push the Panasonic FZ80D to high ISO and handheld to present a couple of sunset images. The photo above is a JPEG straight out of the camera. The image was taken at ISO 3200, and the exposure is 1/20th of a second at f/4.4 at a focal length of 79mm (in 35mm equivalent. You can see that the image has some noise, but the image stabilization wasn’t ba for this situation. Taking the above JPEG image, cropping it, and running it through some minimal post-processing resulted in this:

Here’s a second shot of the same sunset taken at a slightly wider focal length:

Again, not bad, not great. Here’s what came out of cropping and post-processing:

I’ll have to try a similar sunset situation in RAW and see what I can do to minimize the noise without compromising the sharpness.

Слава Україні! (Slava Ukraini!)

My Panasonic FZ1000 is a superb camera, and I love the resolution of the 1-inch sensor, but it was way past its prime and in need of repair. So I decided to downgrade the sensor and upgrade the zoom range by getting a Panasonic FZ80D. Over the course of this week I’ll be presenting some JPEG images taken with the FZ80D.

Today I’m concentrating solely on the range of the 20-1,200mm (35mm equivalent) zoom feature.

This week will not be an indepth review. I haven’t even tried the RAW capabilities yet. Rather, this will just be a quick-and-dirty look at what comes out of the camera in JPEG format with minimal post processing.

Just how difficult is it to take pictures at extreme focal lengths? Well, if the camera is handheld, you’re a bit unsteady or it’s windy (as it was when I took today’s photos) and you’re not careful on what the camera chooses to focus upon, you get a bit of blur. This is evident in the photo above. Fortunately, my hand steadied for the final two images in today’s article.

Needless to say, the zoom range is astounding on this camera. That should come in handy on some upcoming trips to Africa and India, especially for wildlife.

On Wednesday I’ll present some low-light sunset photos, which will give you an idea of how much noise comes from the FZ80D’s 18 megapixel 1/2.3″ (6.16 x 4.62 mm) CMOS sensor. And on Friday I’ll show you have versatile that 1,200mm lens is for taking an extreme photo of the Moon.

Слава Україні! (Slava Ukraini!)