Big Tree in Moss Park

Big Tree - Panasonic GF1 & Pentax-M 40mm f2.8 Pancake.

The weather has been nice and warm this year and consequently, the trees change colour gradually without turning brown from cold weather.  It's just beautiful everywhere you look, even in the city.  Autumn has always been my favourite season.  Too bad usually by November, snow will come and you can feel winter even before it's officially here.  Winter is too long in Toronto.

Seeing in near Darkness

Hanging Flower Pot - Panasonic GF1 & JML 25mm f0.95 @ f0.95

One of the reasons we love super fast lenses is that we can take pictures in very dim conditions.  It would be a bonus if that fast lens is usable wide open.  Two cheap fast lenses I have been using extensively are JML 25mm f0.95 and the sister lens JML 50mm f0.95 TV Lenses.  The 50mm is very large and heavy, but the 25mm is petite.  Both are well made and unfortunately only comes in c-mount.  Although cheap, both lenses are actually quite usable at f0.95.  Sure, they are no Noctilux, but do give you very interesting pictures wide open.  It can pretty much throw any back ground out of focus if focused at minimum focusing distance.

Too bad the 25mm doesn't cover the entire sensor of the micro 4/3 format, and has severe vignetting, and edges are very blurry, but I like it, a lot.

New Toy -- Panasonic GF1

Picked up a used GF1 from Uwe today.   I have known Uwe for years from buying/selling on Craigslist.  He's a super nice guy who also enjoy old, manual focus lenses.

Now, I really do not need the GF1.  It's just more evidence that I am a real incurable gears addict.  Part of the reason was that my son Ryan has been nagging me to get a camera that can do HD movie, since I no longer have the T2i or the 7D.  Another reason was that I want to see if it can replace my G1, so that I don't have to carry a larger camera.  The answer is probably a "No".

It's awkward to hold the GF1, especially if you have larger/long lenses.  This a camera not suitable for manual focus lenses, unless you put it on tripod.  The high-res viewfinder and articulated LCD screen on the G1 is much much better for this purpose.  The major strength I see with this camera, is to use with pancake lenses, especially the 20mm f1.7, which unfortunately I do not have.

The movie is quite respectable.  Very high quality video and the continuous focusing in video is a real plus.  The speed of focus is a magnitude faster than the T2i/7D, even with the slow kit lens in dim light. I think I will use this camera more for video clips than taking pictures. 

The image quality is similar to the G1 -- very good in low ISO but falls apart after ISO 400.  I will use ISO 800 in emergency, but anything higher than that is too noisy.

Overall, it's a nice little camera that needs some nice small AF pancakes.

Flower -- GF1 & Canon FD 50mm f1.4 SSC at f1.4. Click to enlarge.

Dead Leaf - GF1 & Canon FD 50mm f1.4 SSC. Click to enlarge.

Bridge - GF1 & Canon FD 50mm f1.4 SSC. Click to enlarge.