When the Chips are Up

Since we had no real winter, the chipmunks were out of their boroughs early this year. I took some time to just sit in the yard like I did last year and got a few good shots right out of the gate. Plus it was great to be sitting in the warm sunshine of mid-March – it was a crazy 65º F. Writing this on March 19 I see we have some snow coming for the weekend, but I hope at this point it’s the predicted 3 inches.

With this post I’ll show the photos, but also it’s a good place to add some info about the Lumix G9 M2 because I’ve learned a few tricks and have come to adopt some new features into my normal routine. If you don’t have that camera, but have a very new hybrid mirrorless model, some of these might still apply so bear with me. Or feel free to skip the camera talk and just enjoy the cuteness.

So for the most part, working with the new rig has been great, but I’ve had a few moments of buyer’s remorse. Mostly it had to do with missing focus and having blurry photos. My camera handling method hasn’t changed and neither has my choice of subjects so I was REALLY frustrated by the number of OOF shots compared to the original G9. I changed up a bunch of settings and did some testing and even dropped into a Lumix Live session on You Tube to ask Sean if he could recommend camera settings to improve my hit ratio. He was a bit baffled by my situation, but recommended turning off the OIS (lens-based image stabilization) to see if that helped. Since I use the M1 versions of the 12-35mm and the 35-100mm lenses they might not work properly with the Dual IS system. I tried it and it didn’t help. Thinking about it further, I would hope that the software would function to be optimized for whichever lens is attached. It seems that it does and the biggest difference with it on v. off is the viewfinder. With it off, handheld shots wobble quite a bit in the EVF and it’s really disconcerting. Plus it didn’t make a difference to the resulting photos.

What did was turning the Focus Peaking sensitivity to -2. The manual says that it could result in sharper photos because the highlighted area would be smaller with less bleed over areas and so be easier to see what really is highlighted. That did seem to help, but the biggest difference is that I realized that zooming to 100 or 200 % with the shots side by size will not be the same since the resolution of the M2 is 25% more than the M1. Doh! No wonder the M2 images looked blurry by comparison.

So with that finally settled, I had this session with the chippies and really tried out the Animal eye/body detection. It works pretty darn great. When it could lock on an eye, it did, when it couldn’t because the critter was too distant or turned away, it locked on the body. It seemed to work better in stills than in video though.

This issue, I think, was that I had the Zone focus area set rather than the Full area set. For stills I mostly have the animal in or close to the center of the frame and the focus zone is either large enough to find the subject or I can lock and reframe or move the zone. When it locks on the eye or body it puts a box around it and stays locked pretty well as either the chipmunk or I moved. However, when shooting video, I sometimes want to show the animal moving through the frame, so if I only have a small focus zone selected and it moves out of that area, of course it can’t reacquire focus. Another doh! moment.

Which brings me to something that’s always bugged me since I started shooting more video. That settings from the photo mode I was in would come over to video and I’d have to reset everything. It’s especially painful when working with wildlife. Typically I use very fast shutter speeds and ISO for those kinds of stills – 1/2000 second or so. That’s really not going to work for video. Ditto for the color profile or camera style I want to use. With the M2 I have so many more options including V-log and Like 709 that aren’t ideal for stills, but would carry back over when I switched back to a stills mode. Really irritating and could potentially cause me to miss shots.

Hooray for Panasonic for making this a non-issue!

Turn to the Creative video mode on the dial and then the cog menu, second page under Image Quality you’ll find this –

What you’re doing is separating the still and video settings by selecting which you don’t want to port over. You get the little video camera icon when that happens, otherwise, whatever you set in any of the stills modes goes over to video settings when you turn to the video mode on the dial. Here I’ve changed two and left three so you can see the difference.

Here’s a shot I got before realizing you could do that separation where I forgot to change from 1/60th of a second –

Can you believe it’s still that crisp at 350mm handheld? The image stabilization of the G9 M2 is amazing even with a nearly 10-year old lens.

And a couple more just for fun. There’s a rock under the bird feeder that makes for a great little stage if I sit long enough and wait. This chip came by and stood to have a quick scrub.

Oh and speaking of the mode dial – some complained that it doesn’t lock like it does on the G9 M1. Since I only occasionally locked it up and almost never accidentally turned it, I wasn’t too worried. The dial on the M2 is much stiffer and more difficult to turn so doing it inadvertently is also more difficult.

So that’s it. Hope the cute was enough to outweigh the gear talk and if you’re a hybrid shooter with another brand, maybe some things are really similar and it was valuable.