Turtle rock creek

As I said I would in Camera Functions I Don’t Use, I’ll continue to go down the list of things my camera does in order to see if they will help or if I don’t need to bother.

This is an example of something that might be handy, but that I’ll need to use sparingly – High Resolution. The Lumix G9 has two modes – one that gives you a 7,296 x 5,472 40mpx size image and one that produces a whopping 10368 × 7776 80 megapixel image. Both are available in RAW formats as well as Jpeg, but both are about 125mb. That seems weird to me given the pixel counts, but that’s how it is. So if you use this, not only will you have much larger files coming off the SD card, but I hit the file size limit in Photoshop and chose to save it as a flattened .psd file rather than one that had all the layers which would have needed a .psb which is the Photoshop Large Document format. Phew! I guess folks with huge sensors have this all the time, but it was a bit of an eye-opener for me. If I decide that I need to print really large, this is a good option, but since I never do that, it will be a rarely used feature.

Because it uses the electronic shutter the longest speed it allows is 1-second, which meant I had to up the ISO and open the lens a bit in order to expose this correctly. Another limitation seemed to come with aperture settings and keeping the lens in the sweet spot – I couldn’t close the aperture beyond f/11. The speculation is that the camera keeps whatever lens is attached in its sharpest range – no sense taking a high resolution photo and introducing softness that is inherent with small apertures.

 

Back to normal RAW file mode. I wasn’t in love with that leaning tree in the middle distance, so I only have one shot a little closer in and hadn’t decided to process it at all, but then I changed my mind. Worth the time? Too weird? Too much?

 

So this is a little closer view and definitely a different treatment. The surrounding banks are so heavy with debris that I wondered if removing the color might simplify the image and at first it didn’t, but I kept working on it and so what do you think?

 

And a slightly wider view in color. Lots of distraction removal for both and I have to say that a lot of it was possible in Lightroom. Only a few bigger things needed Photoshop and even then I had to try things on different layers to see which worked best. The Delete and Fill works ok most of the time, but on a couple of these I had to go to Content Aware Fill instead and then I had to play with adding and subtracting areas for it to work from. Neither is perfect, but certainly better than it’s ever been. Since there wasn’t any way to remove the problem in the field, I really hoped I could do it in post. Funny what runs through your head when you’re composing a photo.

 

Although I’ve walked its banks many times, this next scene hasn’t come together for me before. The roots had debris on them, I think and with the water so much lower the scene just had no organization. The forest surrounding it was too overwhelming, but I rather like this composition. I had one tripod leg on the bank itself and the other two down on some branches that were caught on some roots on the edge just below. The set up no doubt looked strange, but was secure and I decided to play with some shutter speeds just to see which I liked better, something I’m doing a lot lately with brook photos.

 

With this next little section I tried the High Resolution feature again. Originally when the G9 was released, High Res could only be output to a Jpeg, but now it is RAW, too, but also there are two different modes to deal with objects moving in the frame. Originally the software wasn’t smart enough to isolate an object and freeze its action so anything moving looked ghostly and strange. After a firmware update it can fix things into place if you choose to do so, and from what I’ve seen it’s pretty good. I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t be staged to try it on so I used the original method which keeps moving objects blurry in the final photo. With water like this that works and so we have a long-exposure look without it being long in reality.

 

And here it is as an 80 megapixel High Res image – the one above is 1/10 and the one below is .6, but with 8 photos combined into one, it looks much longer. Cool huh? I really should have tried the other motion mode, but I didn’t so that will have to be for another outing. No shortage of brooks and river so stay tuned.

 

So that’s it for stills from this outing. Because I had my new variable neutral density filters with me, I shot a lot of video as well. Not that I needed the NDs because it was so overcast, but I did play around trying different things and just trying to improve my skills with video. After 35 years of trying to keep a camera still, you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to move the darn thing!