Author: Nigel Paterson

Writer, photographer, videographer, motorcyclist, parent...

Blue Pool Panorama

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We visited, shot, swam in and jumped off the walls of the Blue Pools today. The place is magnificent and lends itself well to the panoramic feature of the Leica D-LUX. (Yes, then water looked green rather than blue. Such is life).

Shot with the built-in panoramic feature of the Leica D-LUX, and a polarising filter.
Shot with the built-in panoramic feature of the Leica D-LUX, and a polarising filter.

Pelicans

Photography

Had the opportunity to shoot a flock or two of pelicans as the local fisherman threw them the heads of the fish they’d caught.

Most of the images were shot at 1/1000th of a second, shutter priority, 200ISO. For most I had a polarising filter attached. If you like more details, leave a comment/question.

All were shot with the Leica D-LUX (Type 109) (aka Panasonic LX100).

A walk along the shore

Photography

Yamba, on the far Northern NSW coast, is a very pretty place. I took an hour or so and came back with a few nice images.

Macro isn't a really strong point of the D-Lux, but it's not bad, either. The control over the Aperture and the fast lens makes for nice bokeh and shallow depth of field.
Macro isn’t a really strong point of the D-Lux, but it’s not bad, either. The control over the Aperture and the fast lens makes for nice bokeh and shallow depth of field.
The pelicans around Yamba aren't worried by people wielding cameras - at least not too much, otherwise I would never have made this image, which was shot from just a few metres away. This image is a tweaked JPEG - if Aperture supported the RAW files, I would have used that, but this looks OK.
The pelicans around Yamba aren’t worried by people wielding cameras – at least not too much, otherwise I would never have made this image, which was shot from just a few metres away.
This image is a tweaked JPEG – if Aperture supported the RAW files, I would have used that, but this looks OK.
The D-Lux does nice black & white in camera. In this image I've used the red filter option, which has darkened the sky very effectively.
The D-Lux does nice black & white in camera. In this image I’ve used the red filter option, which has darkened the sky very effectively.

A compact holiday

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I have access to a huge range of incredible photographic tools – Canon Full Frame and Olympus m4/3 systems, video cameras, many lenses, flashguns, filters, tripods… but on holidays this Christmas all I’ve brought along is the Leica D-Lux (Type 109, aka Panasonic LX100).

I use the bigger equipment for work, and I enjoy my work, but this holiday is about the family. It’s about getting out on our 30 year old trailer boat, riding some bicycles, walking along the beach, swimming and surfing and drinking and eating too much.

The sort of things most Australians do at Christmas.

So I brought along the little Leica, a polarising filter and a tripod (which are the first two accessories I recommend to anyone taking up photography – before you buy a second lens, buy a tripod).

Anyway, I’ll publish a few images here and maybe I’ll even talk about how they were captured.

I got up early for this one. The Type 109 has bracketing easy to get to in the drive menu - I set it to seven frames, 1 stop apart. It defaults to shooting at a fast frame rate, so a few seconds later all the images were captured. I used aperture priority - ISO 200 @ f/16. I wouldn't usually use such a small aperture, but I wanted the decking sharp, so I needed depth of field to run from about 50cm (under 2 feet) to infinity. The seven frames were combined in Photomatrix Pro, tweaked, and cropped to 16x9.
I got up early for this one.
The Type 109 has bracketing easy to get to in the drive menu – I set it to seven frames, 1 stop apart. It defaults to shooting at a fast frame rate, so a few seconds later all the images were captured.
I used aperture priority – ISO 200 @ f/16. I wouldn’t usually use such a small aperture, but I wanted the decking sharp, so I needed depth of field to run from about 50cm (under 2 feet) to infinity.
The seven frames were combined in Photomatrix Pro, tweaked, and cropped to 16×9.