Panasonic GF1 review

During my two weeks in Paris I shot  almost 1600 photos with my Panasonic GF-1. The great majority of them were with the 20mm f1.7 pancake lens, the rest with the 14-45mm G-Vario. Overall I found the 20mm to be an exceptional lens, but I usually found that it was too long or too short for what I was going for. The zoom lens filled in nicely in terms of focal length, but the slow aperture (3.5-5.6) was nearly always a liability. In addition, it made the camera bulky and instantly identified me as a tourist, whereas the camera with the small lens could fit in my jacket pocket.

The 20mm was most ideal for shooting food in restaurants, the fast aperture quickly blurred the background, while the close focusing distance made it easy go get right in on the eats. Here's my pork chop at Les Botanistes.

Being such a compact lens made the camera less obtrusive and allowed be to get right in to the action easily. Most Parisians ignored my shooting because despite its price and quality the camera looks ridiculously amateurish. Here I was able to wedge the camera between some other customers in line and get this shot of potato pancake vendors at the farmers market:

 
I also found it was a good lens for shooting display windows if you could press the lens right into the glass to eliminate reflections:

But overall I found the lack of a Polarizer to be a huge obstacle, most of the time I ended up with something that looked like this shot of Bellota (an amazing prosciutto style ham that is made from pigs that are fed only acorns which sells for 270 Euro per Kilo):

One more thing of note is about the exposure meter on the GF-1. I usually shoot with my gamut warning turned on, and I was noticing that in 90% of my shots, something was being blown out, usually the sky or something else in the background. To remedy that, I shot everything at -1 stop under. Some would argue the wisdom of this, but I found it gave me a much more film-like look. This shot from the top floor of the Centre Pompidou illustrates my point:

In short, I really liked shooting the GF-1 but wouldn't mind a wider choice of prime lenses and a few more mega-pixels. I should have brought the 50mm f1.2 Nikon I use with my Canon with the micro four thirds adapter, but I didn't want to weigh myself down with a lot of gear. After all this was a vacation, and not a shooting trip.

Also I read recently that Panasonic is coming out with a 14mm f2.5 ASPH lens, which I am eager to try. I think on the next trip I could make do with the 14mm & 20mm and leave the zoom at home.