Last week I went along to the State Surf Lifesaving Championships at Kurrawa Beach on the Queensland Gold Coast. It was a grey day with threatening clouds, certainly not your typical 'Beautiful one day, perfect the next' sort of day, but that did not daunt the competitors and the choppy waves made the surf boat competition that much more exciting. More than one competitor was spilled out into the surf, some oars and sweeps were broken and in one case the whole boat up-ended throwing the five crew members in all directions.
I was testing out the Panasonic Lumix GH1 system with the 45-200mm and the 7-14mm zooms so see how if performed in the situations where a pro dSLR might normally have been used i.e. sport photography. I'm pleased to report that the GH1 performed admirably. The 45-200mm has excellent 'pull' being the equivalent of a 400mm lens on a full frame dSLR. The AF is very fast and accurate - I had it set on follow focus for the surf boat shots and it missed very few. The motordrive could be a bit faster, you need to carefully time your shots, but the good news is that the shutter release button is very responsive with little delay.
The 7-14mm lens is astonishing. It's wider than almost anything short of a fisheye, 14mm equivalent, and the perspective you can get is quite extreme. Better yet, it's very sharp, right to the edges with little discernable light fall-off. It's a delightful little lens, in fact it's so tiny it's hard to take it seriously. Nevertheless, it's a great tool and I enjoyed having that super-wide 'look' available to me.
Here's a quick time-lapse I did:
All in all, I found using the GH1 to be a very pleasant experience. It's discrete, lightweight and very effective at all forms of photography, including the very demanding genre of sport photography.
