GardenersHelper
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I recently bought a 2006 vintage camera, a Panasonic FZ50 bridge camera. It is in the same line as the FZ200 and more recently FZ330 bridge cameras that I use for insects, spiders etc. I bought it because it was used for some years, until quite recently actually, by one of my macro heroes, Mark Berkery, and I wanted to try it myself. It has a couple of advantages. It has a lens that does not extend when zooming, which is good for achromat users like me. It also, and unusually for a small sensor camera, goes to f/11 rather than f/8, which means that it should provide around 40% more DoF than I can get with my FZ200 and FZ330.
I can't really test it much until next spring with the size of invertebrates I prefer to work with, although I might try it with springtails if I can find some. Still, I wanted to test it to see if it works ok and so I did some test shots, including some botanical stuff in the garden.
I usually use a Canon 70D for botanical photos because I like the tonality I can get from it. I use the 70D with a 55-250 STM lens, with and without a mild Canon 500D close-up lens. Here are eight of my test shots with the FZ50, all using the Canon 500D I think.
Small sensor cameras get noisy very fast as you move away from base ISO. In fact, when I am pulling up shadows and otherwise bending and shaping flower images my FZ200 and FZ330 can be noisy even at base ISO. To combat this I shoot raw and pre-process the images with DXO Optics Pro's raw-only Prime noise reduction, which can make a huge amount of difference. DXO also provides microcontrast adjustment and lens-specific "lens softness correction" which I find helps in bringing out detail in my images. Unfortunately DXO doesn't handle FZ50 images.
Because of the noise issues, using ISOs above base ISO is asking for trouble with these small sensor cameras, the more so if you insist on some sometimes quite aggressive post processing which I do. Especially if you don't have something like DXO to help. So bear that in mind please - five of these eight images are ISO 200, and the other three are ISO 800, which is silly really (it is roughly equivalent to ISO 10,000 on my 70D). The images were processed in Lightroom and for the most horribly noisy ones I used Nik Dfine to reduce the noise in the backgrounds (apart from the first image, which is an ISO 200 out of the camera JPEG - part of the testing was comparing out of the camera JPEGs with processed raw files).
Given the age of the camera, and the fact I couldn't use DXO, with subject matter that I usually use a dSLR for, I was quite pleased with what this 10 megapixel vintage camera could deliver. (All natural light btw.)
There are 1300 pixel high versions of these images in this album at Flickr, along with the rest of the test images from that session.
1
1008 08a OOC JPEG 2016_10_21 P1060375 1300h by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
2
1008 14b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060405 LR6 1300h by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
3
1008 15b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060409 LR6 1300h by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
4
1008 20b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060423 LR6 1300h Df by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
5
1008 35b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060487 LR6 1300h Df by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
6
1008 40b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060512 LR6 1300h Df by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
7
1008 45b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060547 LR6 1300h by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
8
1008 46b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060548 LR6 1300h by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
I can't really test it much until next spring with the size of invertebrates I prefer to work with, although I might try it with springtails if I can find some. Still, I wanted to test it to see if it works ok and so I did some test shots, including some botanical stuff in the garden.
I usually use a Canon 70D for botanical photos because I like the tonality I can get from it. I use the 70D with a 55-250 STM lens, with and without a mild Canon 500D close-up lens. Here are eight of my test shots with the FZ50, all using the Canon 500D I think.
Small sensor cameras get noisy very fast as you move away from base ISO. In fact, when I am pulling up shadows and otherwise bending and shaping flower images my FZ200 and FZ330 can be noisy even at base ISO. To combat this I shoot raw and pre-process the images with DXO Optics Pro's raw-only Prime noise reduction, which can make a huge amount of difference. DXO also provides microcontrast adjustment and lens-specific "lens softness correction" which I find helps in bringing out detail in my images. Unfortunately DXO doesn't handle FZ50 images.
Because of the noise issues, using ISOs above base ISO is asking for trouble with these small sensor cameras, the more so if you insist on some sometimes quite aggressive post processing which I do. Especially if you don't have something like DXO to help. So bear that in mind please - five of these eight images are ISO 200, and the other three are ISO 800, which is silly really (it is roughly equivalent to ISO 10,000 on my 70D). The images were processed in Lightroom and for the most horribly noisy ones I used Nik Dfine to reduce the noise in the backgrounds (apart from the first image, which is an ISO 200 out of the camera JPEG - part of the testing was comparing out of the camera JPEGs with processed raw files).
Given the age of the camera, and the fact I couldn't use DXO, with subject matter that I usually use a dSLR for, I was quite pleased with what this 10 megapixel vintage camera could deliver. (All natural light btw.)
There are 1300 pixel high versions of these images in this album at Flickr, along with the rest of the test images from that session.
1
1008 08a OOC JPEG 2016_10_21 P1060375 1300h by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
2
1008 14b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060405 LR6 1300h by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
3
1008 15b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060409 LR6 1300h by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
4
1008 20b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060423 LR6 1300h Df by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
5
1008 35b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060487 LR6 1300h Df by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
6
1008 40b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060512 LR6 1300h Df by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
7
1008 45b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060547 LR6 1300h by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
8
1008 46b RAW 2016_10_21 P1060548 LR6 1300h by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
