New camera

The poor old Sony SLT A-33 was getting a bit long in the tooth (nearly 6 years old). It has performed well but I have  had a couple of times where I couldn't set the aperture, however a reboot fixed the problem. This was my first interchangeable lens camera and I knew that you generally get locked into a camera brand by the lenses you buy. The Sony seemed like a good camera at the time and the lens mounting system had been around for quite awhile (A-mount which was compatible with the old Minolta AF mount), so I assumed that all sony's new cameras would use it. Unfortunately, Sony changed to a new system, the E-mount a couple of years ago for all their new cameras, so whatever new camera I bought I would need to get some new lenses as well. 

After doing quite a bit of research I ended up getting a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX85, which had only just been released. This has a 16 MP micro-four-thirds (MFT) sensor with all sorts of fancy in camera stabilisation. The advantage of the MFT system is that both Panasonic and Olympus make both cameras and lenses which are interchangeable so hopefully I won't get stuck in a few years when I want a new camera. I got a Panasonic 14-140 mm lens (28-280 mm 35 mm equivalent) with the camera and also got a Panansonic 100-300 mm lens (200-600 mm equivalent) for long distance photos. A comprehensive review of the camera can be found here - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonic-lumix-dmc-gx85-gx80-review

It has lots of fancy modes and also 4K video shooting, so I spent a bit of time going through the manual so see how it all worked. It is fairly compact but feels quite solid in its build quality and both the screen for the EVF and the rear display screen are OLED screens and they make the old LCD screens on the Sony seem fairly primitive. Just like the Retina screens that Apple produced make the old screens seem prehistoric. I took the camera and the 14-140 lens for a walk around Currumbin Creek one Saturday arvo and had a play with some of the fancy modes. One thing I should say is that the autofocus is also amazing compared to the old Sony. The colours and close up shooting were great for flowers. 

One of the modes that is quite interesting is a monochrome mode called L.Monochrome which produces nice moody images. 

I was also able to geotag all the images from the walk by using the Panasonic iPhone app which records a gps log while you are shooting and then when you are back home connects to the camera by WiFi to download the track to the camera and tag each of the images. Unfortunately, this is all done without being able to get at the gps points, which means I can't use them to make a map of the walk. At present I'm shooting in Raw and jpeg mode but really only using the jpeg's as I'm not particularly good at processing the RAWs to produce anything even close to what comes out of the camera. 

The following weekend I went for a wander down to the beach with the big lens on and quickly realized that it is not real good as a general walk around lens. But I was able to get some reasonable photos and even some 4K video. 

This was looking north to Surfers Paradise at the lowest zoom (100 mm). 

From the same spot at the highest zoom (300 mm).

The 4K video I shot was of some jet skis out in the ocean at the maximum and I was a bit hard to keep the subjects in the middle of the shot but the stabilization helped to miniseries the shakes. It's on YouTube but you can't see it in full 4K just HD - https://youtu.be/7_0Nx8_NNfU

On the way home I tried out the selective colour mode on the Honey Bee Koala in the park, it lets you specify just one colour to show through with the rest of the image being converted to monochrome. Probably not the best example as there isn't that mush contrast difference with the yellow. 

All up I'm quite impressed so far and while I have a handle on the basics of the camera, I have a lot more to learn, to make use of the full features available.