Going Mirrorless

Meet my new camera!

I've been thinking about going mirrorless since visiting the Photography show in Birmingham last year and last week I purchased a Lumix DMC-GX80.  I love love love my SLR but it is kinda big and heavy particularly when I'm just photographing for fun. With the absence of a mirror the Lumix is compact, light and much more portable.

It also has a whole load of new features so I took it out for a little test shoot last week to try some of them out. 

It came with a 12- 32mm kit lens which doesn't have a focusing ring but you can still focus manually using the buttons on the back of the camera which is cool. 

It also has a function called "Post Focus" which allows you to take a photo and choose the focal point afterwards as it records several versions of the image with all possible focal points in focus. 

When you play the image back it comes up with this screen. You then use the touch screen and tap the area of the image you want to be in focus and save the image as a jpeg.

So you can choose to have either the foreground...

... or the background in focus when you get home! And you can save as many different versions of the image as you have space for. With the photograph below I saved 3 version each with either the foreground, middle or background in focus.

Another feature that I had a go with is the automatic Bracketing. This allows you to take photos while the camera automatically adjusts either exposure, aperture, focus or white balance. The one that I used was the exposure bracket.

First it records the image with the "correct" exposure...

 ... then 1 stop under exposed...

... the 1 stop over exposed. 

Without going into extensive detail about how light meters work, especially matrix metering, sometimes they get it wrong maybe if your subjects is very dark or very light and so by bracketing you're giving yourself some options.

So for example, with the 3 photos above, the first is "correctly" exposed, the second is 1 stop under and the third is 1 stop over but I would choose the under exposed one to keep. 

The other that's handy for composing shots at weird angles is the the tilting screen. I used it a lot as a waist level viewfinder similar to a medium format camera.

P10 test shoot 2

Looking over my images from my first test shoot the morning of the day before the assessment, I suddenly wasn't satisfied that I had enough of a variety of different images to submit. So I went on kind of a mad scramble that afternoon to do another shoot. This time I tried to think a little bit more about what it specifically was about the objects that makes them special to me and came to the conclusion that it's the fact they've been handled. They've had a whole life, so to speak, before they came into my possession. I photographed the objects much closer in this time, focusing on areas where they are held or you can see they have been used.

P10: Defined Practice

This is it. P10. The final module of my degree.... Eek!! That is a scary thought.

Well it happened to me again, I started the module with a completely different idea but given the title of this module is "defined practice" it wasn't becoming defined quickly enough and so I decided to think of a new one.

Whilst brainstorming I revisited a piece of work I did last year, way back when we were only on P6. That was a piece that came about from a curiosity I had to see what "every day" objects looked like when photographed from a birds eye view. As the project progressed it became more about how these objects can trigger memory. So I was thinking along these lines and realised that I had a whole collection of objects that seem so mundane but have sentimental value to me. I went for a little look through my kitchen draws and cupboards in search of crockery and utensils that used to belong to my nanna.

She has featured in my work for another previous module, P7, which was about stand out memories I have of things we experienced together. Sadly, she passed away a little bit before I moved away for university. Instead of buying new kitchen-y bits to take with me, whilst we were clearing out Nanna's house I took a lot of her old things. And so the starting point for this body of work is how I still maintain a physical(ish) connection with her through the act of cooking every day.

It was slighly unfortunate that I came up with this concept while I was at home  for 3 weeks over Easter and all the objects I would be photographing were still in Hereford. We also had an interim assessment timetabled for the first week after the holiday, so my first couple of shoots I conducted at home as soon as I got back to Hereford.