Audio Accessory of the Year. With its attendant camera...
I was photographing for a client yesterday, a law firm in downtown Austin, and we were shooting people images for their website re-design. One of the partners who is taking the lead on the project asked me to shoot all of the portraits (both set up and candid) as squares. I was more than happy to accommodate his request but I was preparing myself for the usual task of re-cropping the images in post production.
With past camera systems having the ability to crop square in the finder meant that your Jpegs opened up in your post processing program as genuine squares but the raw files opened "full gate" and had little lines to indicate the square crops that you thought you wanted. This meant that each raw file had to be handled and cropped individually.
Imagine my surprise when I ingested 525 Panasonic raw files into the latest rev of Lightroom and watched as the program wrote previews as squares; just as I'd shot them. The raw files could be changed into "full gate" files but the default was ready to go squares just as
I'd shot them. Hurray! It's about damn time.... A holiday wish comes true.
One other thing.... I used face/eye detection AF to make portraits yesterday, along with the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro lens. Every frame was right on the money. No hesitation, no waffling, no unnecessary drama. Fun to see the little intersecting boxes and lines at work. Eye detection means no front or back focus when making portraits. One less thing to consider...
I know the Sony A7riii, many Olympus cameras, and my Panasonic cameras can all do eye focus. What other cameras feature this valuable tool? And do they all work this well?
I think most current higher-end cameras feature face detection. And you're right, it's magical! That's why I reach for my Nikon D500 or Fuji XT2 over my full-frame Canon 6D when photographing people. I consider face/eye detection AF far more important than pixel count, frame rate or buffer depth.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Panasonic's long experience in consumer electronics means that usability is in its DNA, even in the tiny niche which I assume digital cameras occupies?
ReplyDeleteThanks Kirk - Works with Fuji RAW files too.
ReplyDeleteI have been very impressed with Panasonic eye detection. My only complaint is it will sometimes choose the wrong eye -- or at least not the eye I would have chosen -- and it can be tricky to convince it to switch. I think Olympus offers more control, though don't know if it is any easier to use.
ReplyDeleteMy Sony A7r (first model) has face and eye detect, but it is nowhere near to Panasonic. More recent Sonys may be better -- I hope they are.