Camera Review Part I

This post is from from my other blog here

I love the Panasonice Lumix line of cameras.  My newest one is the Lumix DMC-FZ18 and has many of the features of the last one but with an 18x zoom rather than the 12x zoom of the last one.  And this one is smaller and easier to carry around.  While there are a lot of things I like about this camera the two best feaures are the zoom and the burst mode.

It is an 8.1-megapixel camera with a 28mm wide-angle lens, and has the Intelligent Auto Mode, which includes Face Detection, Intelligent Scene Selector, and Continuous Autofocus functions.  If you set the picture quality from 8 mp to lower like 5 or 3 you can zoom in even closer, up to 28 times, they call that an extended zoom, not digital.

All the pictures that I take of my feeders and the river mostly are taking through my livingroom windows.

Here is a normal distance picture of the thistle feeder.

Here is the same photo zoomed in 28 times.

Here is the same bird cropped in.

Here are some deer that Dave took.  They were about 75' to 100' away.  They are zoomed in 18 times.

Here is the same image cropped.

Zoomed 18x

Cropped

The burst mode is really great for wild life photography.  Since wild life is always moving it's hard to focus on them but with the burst mode you can keep shooting and that will get you some nice clear shots.

Here is a burst of the deer hightailing it to the island.

Burst 2

Burst 3

Here is a crop of the second burst.

I'll work on some more examples of picture quality and different zooms and crops.