100-300 Panasonic not as Sharp as i wanted

Hallo, First contribution To this site! I have bought The Panasonic 100-300 mii in combination with a G80. Here are Some pictures. It lacks real sharpness in my opinion. I keep Shutter speed fast enough to reduce motion blur. And use AFS and 1-area for focussing. Any thoughts?

F6.3 1/640 iso 640

F8 1/640 iso 400

F7.1 1/2000 iso 800

F11 1/640 iso 2500

Nothing wrong with those whatsoever for a lens which is a 1st generation design and can be bought for as little as just over £200 secondhand ......

I`ve seen worse examples from the expensive PanaLeica 100-400 (which has a very Polarised reputation)

Looks great to me, detail and composition! Nice shots, and they dont look over sharpened/NR/cropped like most of the shots I see.

The first one has a lot out of focus due to the dof required with all the foliage surrounding the main subject, which actually is not bad focusing on the bird, the other pics are as good as it gets. I'd be quite happy with them.

First of all, a very good set of example photos, both artistically, but also regarding the issue. It's nice to answer to these kind of threads.

I think these images are a little bit soft, but OKish. Considering that mammal, it looks quite sharp , but the depth-of-field is not deep enough, and the focus point is not at the head or 'tail' but in between (near front legs; it's well focused and F-value is also good, assuming it was not taken for no pixel-peeping purposes).

With lenses like this, I would recommend shooting raw and tweaking the sharpening parameters, in Lightroom, especially the sharpening diameter. Heavier and more expensive kits can produce sharper images straight out of camera.

Carlo11 wrote:

Thanks for quick and positive respons. Havn’t had such a long lens before. Didn’t know What to expect . Glad to Hear There is nothing wrong with The lens. I Will be happy with it now thanks to you all!!!

it’s not The 1st generation, its The mark ii (480 euro’s)

i Will try to shoot raw! GOOD TIP. Havn’t done That before. I Will find Out.... lots of tips on this forum i suppose.

The G85 is oké, but maybe i Will look for a g9. Pinpoint focussing Will be more accurate i think.

one thing i noticed is the Need for relative fast shutter speeds with these subjects. Stabilisation is useless with moving animals. So with low light it can be difficult to get Sharp images.

If you have someone to give you good advice, you will get better results by using raw with a half day training, but that is very very positive thinking. Raw simplifies things, but developing your own workflow takes some time. Also, raw development won't do miracles, but saving the results of careful analysis of lens/shutter speed/ISO combinations makes it quick and easy in the future. In principle, but I think it's also good to understand what's going on with the processing.

For static subjects there is no reason to upgrade to G9. G85 is already really good. G9 is better for sure, but it's also larger and heavier and more expensive.

Carlo11 wrote:

Hallo, First contribution To this site! I have bought The Panasonic 100-300 mii in combination with a G80. Here are Some pictures. It lacks real sharpness in my opinion. I keep Shutter speed fast enough to reduce motion blur. And use AFS and 1-area for focussing. Any thoughts?

F6.3 1/640 iso 640

F8 1/640 iso 400

F7.1 1/2000 iso 800

F11 1/640 iso 2500

Last three look pretty sharp to me.  Missed focus on the first one (branches futher down from tthe bird look OK

Peace.

John

hey I love those heron and swan shots!!

Just curious, what aperture do you like to use at the tele end? I have been testing the Oly 75-300 which is very similar and rated about the same.....it is not sharp wide open at the tele end...you should stop the aperture down by one stop, which is what I do with the Oly lens. I did some tests and found f/6.7 and f/7.1 not that good at the tele end.... f/8 is better but f/9 is the best. f/10 is also very good but just below f/9 in sharpness and f/11 is also very good but needs more light. I keep the lens at f/9 by default. what is the best aperture for your lens at the tele end?

also how much do you have to stop down the aperture to get rid of the shadows in the corners?  I find that I need f/10 to get rid of them completely at the tele end, but since I crop I am fine with f/8 and beyond.  When I use the 2x digital teleconverter I find that there are no shadows in the corners even at f/8.  I would never go faster than f/8 with this lens at the tele end.

I have the same lens, you have to be careful when you have long distances targets , use 280mm rather 300mm and crop after or if you use 300mm close the aperture 1-2 clicks. Do a comparison to see how your lens copy behaves.
No problem at 300mm with open aperture when the target is close enough. From 100-240mm my copy gives very good results wide open. I’m very satisfy with lens performance and I have compare it with more expensive lenses (old 50-200/2.8-3.5 SWD, LEICA 200/2.8 with 1.4X TC)

I don't have this lens, but am interested in the subject since I myself sometimes find it hard to see when a digital image is sharp enough. So FWIW...

I think the first bird photo is unsharp. The rest of the photos look OK to me.

The two latter bird photos are fine, I think. The photo of the deer is a little dull, but I don't think that's because of lack of sharpness, but because it has low dynamic range. The tones go from black to about 75% gray.

If you expand the dynamic range so it goes from black to white the image lightens up and gets more punch. I hope you don't mind that I borrowed your image to try that.

With expanded dynamic range.

Wildlife photography especially small targets at distance is an expensive hobby .There is a reason the pros use the gear they do, because its required to get consistent results.

I had a dabble a few years ago when I used Canon, gave up because I realised it would take more money and effort than I was able to commit.

If I were to try again on m4/3 reckon I would go with the 300mm or at a pinch the 100-400. I have the 100-300 ii and its ok, nothing more than that. Think you will have to accept its limitations or invest more money for the next step up

Good! I won't go to jail for copyright infringement then.

JPG is no hindrance for this. Many "dull" looking photos gain by expanding the DR. It doesn't fit all images of course, but provided there should be something all black and something all white in the image, see to it there really is and the photo "lifts".

And even if you don't want the tonality to stretch from 0 to 100, you can nudge it until it looks right to you.

Note: I don't use a mainstream editor. This function is probably called something else than  the self explanatory "Expand Dynamic Range" in your software, but I think most editors should have it.

You can take it a step further by increasing local contrast. I do this pretty much manually by creating three masks, one for highlights, one for mid tones and one for shadows. Then I use a curve to increase the contrast, i.e. make the light pixels lighter and the dark ones darker, within each tone range with the help of the masks.

Maybe I overdid it a little (it's fun to play with other people's stuff!), but I think the deer got a little more life in her eye. You can see the image looks sharper (contrast = sharpness) and the colors look more vivid.

I haven't touched saturation, sharpness or anything else. Just those two things I've tried to describe.

and the colors looks more vivid.

Because F8.0 is more than adequate for m43 cropped factor is 2. F8.0 is FF F16.0 in term of DOF, and F11.0 is equivalent to F22.0 in DOF. If anything, F8.0 can help you to maintain adequate shutter speed without going to high ISO.

I've done quite a bit of wildlife shooting with that combination, and been happy with the results.

Tey look fine to me so far as the lens goes.

The first version of the lens was a bit more picky, and really needed to be used at f7.1, IIRC, but the second version seems more forgiving to me