Category Archives: Photography

On paper, the Panasonic GM5 should be an ideal "carry around" camera for me. The same sensor and processor as the excellent GX7 and GH4 in a neat pocket-sized packaged. A proper electronic viewfinder. Access to all the Micro Four Thirds lenses. Panasonic’s engineers have even been cunning beyond the normal behaviour of camera manufacturers and although it has a different battery to its larger brethren, it uses exactly the same charger. I’d managed to get a couple of minutes "hands on" in a shop and was reasonably impressed.

Last week, driven to Amazon by their remarkably "rubbish but effective" Prime Day pseudo-sale, I bit the bullet and ordered one, in a cheerful red. The general capability and image quality, as evidenced above, is all I expected. However, after a few days in my hands it’s going to go back. The reason – size. Like all disappointing love stories, it’s complicated…

It’s Too Large…

Although the GM5 body is tiny, not much larger than a Canon Powershot S series, put a lens, any lens, on the front, and it becomes too large to put in your trouser pocket, and too large to comfortably travel in my computer bag the whole time. In addition, I really need two lenses to cover a decent zoom range. The Panasonic 14-42mm and 45-175mm power zooms are both tiny, but together they make it into a package which demands a camera bag, in reality no different to using a next size up body.

… But It’s Too Small

In use, the camera is remarkably fiddly. I could live with the small buttons, but their legends and markings have also been scaled down, to a point which is almost invisible to me when I’m wearing my glasses. Also the smaller body puts my hands much closer to the lens and viewfinder in use, and I find that with the camera to my eye my hands are fouling my glasses.

Even wearing the smallest lens I own (the 14-42 PZ), there’s a bad case of "lens too big for the camera", and it won’t even sit flat on the desk. More of an issue, there’s no easy way to carry it in the hand, except gripping right round the body or lens, which makes it difficult to raise to the eye for a quick shot without having to use both hands.

For me, however, the killer is the tiny EVF. Impressive in the shop, in real use out and about, wearing my glasses, it’s almost unusable. The effective view size is tiny, and despite several attempts at adjustment I couldn’t get the view sharp with my glasses. You get, at best, a sense of what’s in shot, rather than being able to scan the picture for meaningful details. (Ideally I would have avoided the sextant statue "fouling" the statue of Edward VII on his horse in the above shot, but I just couldn’t see that detail.) If I can’t use the EVF I’d rather have a camera with a size larger rear screen, to give me some chance of being able to use it with glasses on, and in varying ambient light conditions.

So much though I wanted to like this camera, It isn’t for me. Sometimes engineers can shoot for a compromise between two opposing targets and pull off a remarkable double. My delightfully schizophrenic Mercedes Cabrio is a case in point. Sometimes, however, you end up with the worst of both worlds, and that’s what’s happened here.

Just Right?

Ironically, the day I ordered the GM5, Panasonic announced the follow-up model to my much-loved GX7, unsurprisingly named the GX8. The improvements in pixel count, functionality and weather protection are all almost uniformly welcomed, but there’s been some criticism of the fact that the GX8 is a bit bigger than its predecessor, by about 5mm in height and depth, 10mm in width, and 75g in weight.

Now I love my GX7. It’s my favourite camera of the many I’ve owned. But it’s never been out of the house except wearing the bottom half of the "ever ready case" Panasonic supplied with it. This improves its fit to my hand no end. By my estimate, the ERC adds about 5mm to the height and depth, and about 10mm to the width, and weighs somewhere between 25 and 50g. It sounds like the GX8 is spot on!

I wait with baited breath…

I was literally just about to get into bed in my hotel in Liverpool last night, when the air was rent with loud explosions. Fortunately nothing sinister – just fireworks giving a cruise ship a good send-off on her voyage. My hotel room was very well positioned to watch the show, with the fireworks and the ship visible through Liverpool’s "Big Wheel".

I did have my little Canon S120 in my bag, and couldn’t resist trying to capture the scene. I had a minor panic as I ran round the hotel room and rummaged through my bag trying to find something on which to rest the camera – good fireworks photos need exposures of 10s or longer. In the end I think this one was taken with the camera propped up on the TV remote control. Not ideal, but a reasonable success given the circumstances…

Great excitement chez nous last night. The security lights went on and we spotted not one but two hedgehogs snuffling around in the courtyard. Fortunately they stayed round long enough to get a few photos.

The security light provided good illumination, but kept on switching off (as it’s supposed to), so Frances ran around to wave at it and switch it back on. What was very funny was that each time the light came on, the hedgehogs froze mid-snuffle for about 10 seconds, just as portrayed in Over the Hedge, but which we’d never seen before in reality.

I spotted another one later on when I got up for a glass of water, so hopefully these welcome visitors will become a regular feature.

We visit a lot of photography exhibitions. The majority are inspiring or thought-provoking, and well worth the effort of the photographers, the presenters, and the attendees.

Along the way there has been the odd disappointment: sometimes we just don’t connect with the material, on other occasions we have felt that the volume or quality of the work hasn’t justified a high entrance cost. On one occasion an exhibition presented such a biased left-wing viewpoint that I felt desperate for the injection of some balance.

However today we had a new experience – an exhibition based on a good volume of high quality work, at a great location, which failed abysmally due to comprehensive incompetence in curation.

The offending exhibition was Human Rights, Human Wrongs at The Photographers Gallery. The piece was meant to chart the path of human rights since the Universal Declaration in the 1940s, drawing from a large archive of reportage. It failed.

The main problem was the complete absence of any organising principle. With the occasional exception of sequential shots of the same event, there was no attempt to group items by location, subject, date or photographer. It was just a confusing "bunch of stuff". At times the confusion seemed almost wilful – two related, well explained pictures from Vietnam together on a wall, but separated by a wholly unrelated picture from Chad.

The curators provided copies of original notes on some of the images, but these were presented in tiny type well below the average eye line, underneath the photos. To ensure there was no chance of even this being readable the images had thick frames spotlit from above, so half of each caption was adequately lit, and half in deep shadow. In any event there was no attempt to present any context, explanation or information about what happened next – unless the photographer wrote this on the back of the original you were on your own.

The caption typist had clearly lost the will to live with the highly structured but low information content approach, and even managed to mis-spell "Untitled".

Even the choice of content felt random. There were lots of good pictures of American Civil Rights events in the 1960s. Fine. Plenty of pictures of Martin Luther King Jnr, a portrait of JFK and a nice picture of Nixon with Coretta King. Good. But why have a blurry picture of Lee Harvey Oswald but none of Johnson, Bobby Kennedy or Malcolm X?

The supposed light relief afterwards, pictures of horses on the American prairies, didn’t work either, with captions in about 8pt type several feet away from the related shot, and the beautiful animals captured against wilfully ugly backgrounds.

The Photographers Gallery has a great new location, but they don’t seem to know what to do with it. This is an abuse of our human right to a decent exhibition!

Apologies, my first blog post of the New Year really should have wished you all the very best for 2015. Please accept this as a pseudo-first post, with said wishes.

I also just wanted to post this shot from yesterday. A low winter sun, passing clouds and unusually upright pampas grass for January combined to generate this remarkable light pattern. As we were just going out of the door this is a grab shot taken leaning out of the bedroom window, but I think the result worked. I hope it’s an omen for things being “on fire” (in a good way) in 2015.