Welcome to the first photo therapy post and the first of many to come where I look at older more retro cameras and head out on the streets to see how these cameras perform years on! I am excited to start this as I love cameras and have bought and sold to many to remember, its just a petty I didn't blog about all those cameras when I had them... So I am on a journey to buy back those cameras and see how they fare up today.
The only compact camera I have ever owned was the Fuji x20 and what a brilliant camera that was released in 2013, I do intend on buying one but I think I will wait a little until the £400 price tag drops! That's actually double what I sold mine for many years back. So while browsing online I came across the Panasonic Lumix TZ70 a small compact camera which would fit comfortably into my jeans pocket you see I wanted an everyday camera and I just don't like using a phone its just not the same, the tactile feel of a camera the connection to the image you get while looking through a view finder a phone just can't compare to the experience of using a dedicated camera so a compact camera seemed like a great option.
The Panasonic Lumix TZ70 is a 12.1mp camera which allows you to shoot raw and have the option for full manual control and has a cool lens ring which allows you to control aperture or shutter speed, the lens is not the fastest f3.3 to f8 and the shutter speed tops out at 1/2000 sec but with an ace up its sleeve and that is the huge optical zoom range of 24mm to a staggering 720mm (in 35mm terms) which uses a Hybrid optical image stabilisation, so you loose a little and gain elsewhere.
Now these post won't be spec heavy as I want to concentrate on the shooting experience and the images these older cameras produce.... little spoiler alert! I was blown away by this tiny camera and the colours from its raw files!
Check out my video below where I head out onto the streets of Newcastle test the camera out in some very high contrast scenes.
The Lumix LZ70 is such a fun little camera to use and in my opinion a great street photography camera which I think is overlooked, my one and only gripes is the video record button is in the worst place or should I say on the wrong side of the shutter button and I lost count of the times I accidentally hit record whilst trying to compose my images. A huge plus for me was the image quality specifically the colours it produced in the raw images, I said wow quite a few times when reviewing them back on my Mac I actually wasn't expecting to be overly impressed with the image quality so this was a huge bonus. 12mp is way more than enough for social media posts and printing, dynamic range is ok and you can recover detail from the shadows and highlights, overall its a great small compact to use and I am sure that huge zoom range will come in super handy at my sons football games.
Below are a selection of images from my walk around Newcastle, I visit this area quite often with a camera and it always surprises me how it shows me something different every time. I set the camera to shoot Monochrome jpeg + Raw so I am able to see in black and white as I much prefer to shoot like this than convert to black and white in post. The winter sun produced some amazing high contrast scenes on this walk creating some almost silhouette cut out scenes in some of the images which I loved! all of the images are straight out of the camera with no editing other than a little cropping where needed.
Below you can see how much detail you can recover from these images in post, I have only adjusted the shadow and highlight recovery with a slight exposure tweak.