I've just bought myself a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7 with an assortment of Lenses (Merkury Optics 52MM Lens Filters UV & F-DL & PL, and a Merkury Optics Wide Angle / Macro Lense).

Upto now I've been a point and shoot man but as the opportunity came up for this camera I thought it would be a good starting point.

Can anyone shed some light on what situations filters and which type of filter is normally used.

I'm going to Olympia this weekend and would love to get some great shots when I'm there but I need to get some advise/guidence before I go and not take a single good picture. I do have a a few days to play around with it a little and have allready been snapping some local wildlife although I just cant seem to keep my hands still enough on full zoom.

Time to dig out the manual and have a read through when the kids goto bed tonight but in the meantime any pointers would be great.

Thanks

Matthew

By far the most important things to get right are composition and exposure. With the power available in most paint programs these days, I seldom bother with a filter, except for a standard UV filter to protect the camera lens.

If you use say a graduated filter in the shot, and it doesn't work, it can be hard to remove the effect with a paint program, much easier to add the effect later.

I use a Finepix S7000 SLR (digital) and Photo Impact 10 for all my work.

I'm going to Olympia this weekend and would love to get some great shots when I'm there

Experiment with the camera (settings, different ISOs) with what you judge the light quality at Olympia will be like.

For low light conditions you'll either have to bump up the ISO (more noise) or take longer exposures, shake becomes a factor here so you will need to brace the camera or lean against something.

Longer term - to make use of the long zoom I recommend a tripod or monopod (I have both). Monopods ( better to have 171cm version else you'll stoop too much) can be had for around £15 with footrest from 7dayshop or eBay.

A good Panny Forum

Panasonic Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review

If you don't have any noise reduction software then the freeware (Community version) of Noiseware can be downloaded from here -

Imagenomic Noiseware - Unmatched Noise Removal Photoshop Plugin for Digital Images

Edited 17 December, 200817 yr by anonymouse