Lumix 100-300 OIS on Gh2 at Melbourne Moomba Festival

We had fabulous weather and great action over the long holiday weekend here in Melbourne, so I decided to five the 100-300 lens a good work out and see what it could do with fast moving action.

In the end, I abandoned all the camera and lens auto features. I turned off the lens OIS. I shot on manual focus, pre focussing on key action areas, and i abandoned any hope of automatic exposure. I ended up setting exposure manually to cope with the massive contrast in the images, sometimes setting an exposure 5 to 6 stops above the camera meter reading!

What did I learn from all of this?

That I could not have got shots anywhere as near without this lens. All shots were taken at full 300mm extension on the zoom, which effectively gives me a full frame equivalent of 600mm!

I also realised that there are certain situations where no matter how good the electronics in the camera and lens, you just have to go back to basics and manual everything...

All comments welcome...

Nice shots in difficult conditions.
Did you use burst mode?
What was your ratio of keepers?

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Tod Yampel

Duck Club member

My ratio if keepers was terrible...maybe 5%!

I did try burst mode and was quite impressed, although none of these shots are from burst mode.

Nice set of shots, well done on though captures! We remember our ten day stay in Melbourne fondly. Great, beautiful city, we had some fun times like sharing lunch with very friendly feathered friends at the Royal Botanic Gardens!
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Kirk

Fantastic action shots!!!!
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FlickR Photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/46756347@N08/

Really a great set -- 5% keeper rate for a great bunch of photos is still fantastic! Thanks for sharing your skills!

pjmphotooz said:

My ratio if keepers was terrible...maybe 5%!

Click to expand...

You do recognize what the keeper ratio would be with Nikon/Canon? 5% should be a throw away ratio for OOF images, likely less. Not sure why your metering was so off. The water can be tricky but 6 stops did ya say? One way to meter is to meter against 18% gray and hope the light is consistent, or use exposure compensation in shutter priority.

Glad you walked away with some good results. Thanks for posting.
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RonFrank

Impressive! I shoot Kite Surfers and based on LTZ's bird shots have been thinking about this lens on a E-M5 or a G3. Carrying the big Nikons and big lenses across the sand is a pain, literally . I was worried about action shots but these are great

Many thanks for sharing these.
Cheers,
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Anticipate the Light and wing it when you get it wrong
Tom
http://taja.smugmug.com/

Great water ski shots. 5% is pretty good. I am always happy if i have at least 5 very good pics.
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Ellen McIlroy

I don't t think the metering was off...its just that the movement was too quick to use spot metering on the camera, and matrix metering was seeing a whole lot of white water spray in the frame.