An Unscientific Test Of My New Micro Gear

Our moon captured using a Panasonic G3 camera with a
Panasonic 45-200mm (90-400mm equivalent) G Vario lens.

Anyone who follows this blog knows that I have a bit of an infatuation with the moon and an active interest in aerospace which involves continuous study and research. Consequently, I often will be pointing one of my cameras toward the moon on those seemingly rare clear nights with no clouds obscuring the sky. 

Last night we had a sky with a light, wispy cloud cover but our moon was bright and beckoning through our living room window. Needless to say, I grabbed some of my camera gear and headed outside.

As I've written in recent blog posts, I just picked up a used camera and lens in the tiny Micro Four Thirds format. I really haven't had much of an opportunity to test it out though for numerous reasons. This was one camera and lens combo that I knew I should test on the moon last night.

Most of the night I had to struggle getting clear shots of the moon because of thin, wispy clouds veiling the moon. Adding to the challenges of capturing a sharp image was the fact that I was too lazy to drag my tripod outside so I shot the long focal lengths holding the camera and long lens in my hands... trying to steady myself on whatever stationary objects which were nearby. 

I did manage to capture a few decent shots between three cameras each with their own paired lens. One of these combos was longer (for a closer view) than this Micro Four Thirds combo and the other was shorter (for a slightly wider view) than this Micro Four Thirds combo. Ironically, the combo with the longest reach and closest view produced the worst image quality... which is the main reason I purchased this used Panasonic gear!

In the end, it turns out that this little used Micro Four Thirds Panasonic combo produced my nicest shot last night. That is promising and it instills some confidence for other types of long-focal-length shooting this summer. I should also point out that getting this nice shot did require some fiddling with settings to get the shot I managed to get. In the end, I wasn't too thrilled with the jpg file and used the raw file. 

I'm still trying to figure out the best settings for this camera but I will probably use the raw output much more often than the jpg output. Using these raw files requires a bit more post-processing on my computer but, nevertheless, I'm really looking forward to testing out this combo for wildlife photography at the lake this summer.

I'm also looking forward to more crystal clear night skies at the lake to do wider shots of our celestial neighbors in our own astro-backyard... photos of the Milky Way. I will use different gear for those shots but I'm excited about a few different types of photography to immerse myself into over the next few months.

In the meantime, here is another glimpse of our nearest celestial object... our moon. This little unscientific test proved that my recent purchase of this used Micro Four Thirds gear is giving me clearer, sharper images of objects far away... I'm looking forward to trying this out on wildlife photography soon!