GH2 Worth buying a GH2?

M. Gilden said:
Not that the GH2's stills are BAD... but ... the images aren't that much nicer than my point-and-shoot Powershot, so I generally leave it in my video recording bag.
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Now that's just being silly .... I have a GH2 and several Powershots, and the latter are not even playing in the same league!
 
Hey guys I have one last new photographer question that I was hoping I could be helped out with. I am loving the camera so far but the one thing that is killing me is the fact that I am having trouble getting proper exposure and crisp looking photos at the same time.


Now I am pretty familiar with how to properly set one's shutter speed in order to get clear photos (more or less use the inverse of one's focal length, and for GH2's we multiply by two given the size of our sensors). So that means with my kit lens I can basically use anything between 28-84 depending on my focal length. I was trying to do some shooting at night and I was having a hard time getting my images proper exposure. Since I was maxed out at f 3.5 thanks to my kit lens and my ISO was at about 1600 (which was as far as I wanted to push it) I basically had to lower my shutter speed in order to get proper exposure. Of course when I did that a lot of my images were blurry simply because I was just out and about and not using a tripod.

So my question is. How much do the faster lenses help in allowing one to maintain proper exposure and shutter speed? Is going from an f 3.5 lens to say the f 1.7 pancake lens really going to make that much of a difference in terms of my ability to maintain shutter speeds and use low ISO's?

I totally understand that a camera has its limits and that you can't expect it to shoot good images with little light, a slow aperture, and a respectable ISO setting but I am really just curious to see how much the faster lens is going to help the camera in terms of exposure (I know a higher quality lens will do wonders to picture quality).
 
AdventMediaProductions said:
I also have kind of a lame question but what's the best way to prevent blurry pictures?
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The best way to prevent blurry pictures is to use a tripod.

Failing that, the next best option is to use a heavier camera.

Whether the camera uses film or a digital sensor is, for the most part, irrelevant as far as these things go.


The "modern" trend is cameras that are smaller and lighter, which means they are easier to shake and vibrate and get blury pictures from. That is my second-biggest complaint so far about the GH1. The biggest is that I haven't had the time to figure out how to avoid the vertical lines showing up in the bulk of my movie footage when I'm indoors. Lighting I'm sure... can't always do that, though.
 
Thanks for the suggestions guys.

i totally agree with the lightness of the GH2, it was very surprising.

But out of shear curiosity though. How much do the extra F-stops help?
 
Broadly speaking, in low-light hand-held conditions, if you use the Lumix 20mm f1.8 wide open, instead of the 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 kit wide open, your pics will be 4-8X sharper (i.e. you will get 1/4 - 1/8th the amount of motion blur).

Whereas on a tripod, the sharpness of in-focus objects will be similar with the two lenses, although the 20mm will have much shallower Depth of Field.
 
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