Tracy and I went to Lamma Island for the Chung Yeung festival. The night before I thought to myself, what camera gear should I bring with me. When I first came to Hong Kong, this wasn’t an issue. I only had one camera (the Panasonic FZ30) and the lens could not be removed. However, it did have an impressive 35 – 420mm equivalent zoom range. I took a lot pictures with that camera before I gave it away and upgrading to the Panasonic G1, but back to the question of which camera gear to take.
I thought about bring a big camera bag with several different lens or even a gimbal to capture some video, but I didn’t entertain those thoughts for very long because I knew that spending more time on my camera stuff would also mean spending less time with Tracy. For example, I can get pretty absorbed into what I am doing when I shoot video with a gimbal. I finally decided to bring my Panasonic GX85 with a fixed 40mm equivalent pancake lens.
Pancake Lens
The camera body is pretty small and as the name pancake suggests, the lens is also pretty small. Fixed lens (not zoom-able) tend to have very good sharpness. I was able to fit it in a small fanny pack. Of course, the problem of not having a zoom is that you have to rely on your feet to do the “zooming” for you. If you look at the view and find that not everything fits in the shot you just have to back up a little bit till it all fits in. Yes, you can’t always back up and that is one of the challenges to this approach. It won’t work for everything. However for fun outings like this one, where you have time to size up your shot, it makes a good choice. Sure there were some wide shots that I missed, but overall I think it was okay. In addition, Tracy and I had a good time together.
Food Pictures at the Green Cottage
The pancake lens did a good job with the food pictures. It has a 1.7 maximum f-stop and the lighting was dark. Being able to open the lens up to 1.7 would have been great. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to use it fully open with the food as there just would not have been enough food in focus. I don’t normally like to go over 1600 ISO with M43 cameras. Still, I decided that dealing with the noise in post was the best option. Therefore some of the shots were taken at 2000 ISO.
I took most of the pictures with the 40mm lens on the GX85. Even the butterfly stayed on the branches and kindly waited for me to take its pictures. This meant that I was pretty close to it and the noise of the shutter didn’t scare it. I was really surprised. There were a few places where I used the a 70-200 equivalent zoom lens, but in actuality I could have left it at home.
Lastly, I brought a kind of a catch all pocket camera just in case. The Panasonic ZS60 has been out for four years now and can be gotten for a relatively good price used. I did a review on it. If you are interested. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the newer cameras (no 4K), but it does have good optics and an incredibly long zoom range (24-720mm equivalent). As long as there is enough light, it should do okay.
The Right Gear
Now that I have finished the trip and developed the pictures and can definitely say I made the right choice to bring the Panasonic gx85 and the 1.7 20mm pancake lens. It gave me a 40mm equivalent zoom and was a good choice for most of the pictures I shot. I love the 1.7 aperture. It offers a pleasing shallow depth of field.
