Lumix G9 – Bexhill on Sea

A trip down to Bexhill on Sea today to give the G9 a run out.

The De La Warr Pavilion is an Art Deco grade 1 listed building buit in 1935 – it makes a fine photographic subject.

Be sure to click on each image and then click again to view a larger image.

I am more than happy with the quality that the G9s sensor appears to be capable of resolving and with good dynamic range.

I also had the chance to try out the high resolution mode where using pixel shift technology the camera takes eight images and then merges them in camera to produce a super high resolution image, in this case an 80 mega-pixel image ! The detail in the the full size version of this image is nothing short or astonishing.

The high resolution  mode can only be used on subjects that are not moving since any movement that occurs during the time that it takes the camera to capture the eight exposures can cause stange artefacts/ghosting.  Despite this restriction I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if I took an image of the sea.

First up is an image captured with a shutter speed of 1/80s, if you look very closely at the full size version of this image a gull can be seen eight times as it flys through the image – click on the image to see larger to see if you can spot it.

In order to counter the issue of movement I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if the longest available shutter speed (for hi-res mode) of 1s is used.  Any movement of birds etc is just totally blurred out so that you cannot see it.  Posted below are 1s exposure normal and hi-res examples – even in the normal resolution image the detail resolved is excellent.

Here is the hi-res version.  If you look very carefully at the full size image you can see some ghosting of the water although this really only is visible when pixel peeping (which I don’t do !).  As far as the hi-res mode goes I would say so far so good and I think it is going to be worth exploring more and may be more useful than I had at first thought.

Click here if you would like to see the full size image, once loaded click on the image again to see full size – warning large file

And finaly here is a true long exposure image, in this case taken with a Lee Big Stopper and a shutter speed of 25s.  Long exposure noise reduction (dark frame) was on and I am pleased to see that the image is very clean.  I was also extremely pleased to find the the G9 is capable of accurately metering through the Big Stopper, this is the first camera I have had that is capable of this.