hi this is Graham from Jenham's Astro if you look at the videos on my channel you'll find that
it will have been taken with one of two types of camera it'll either be a digital slr like this one
or dedicated astro camera something like this in this video we're going to try something different
we're going to see whether this camera which is known as a bridge camera or a super zoom camera
can provide an alternative so what i've done is i've picked a camera that is
basically a budget model for bridge cameras it's a 300 pounds here in the UK and it's a
Panasonic Lumix fz82 which is a camera that's been around for a while it's pretty versatile a lot of
people use it for wildlife photography and it's just a bit more capable than the sort of camera
you now have on smartphones which obviously are pretty capable cameras these days anyway.
so we're going to see whether this camera which perhaps is often purchased for use
when you're on holiday where you want to get a better view of a zoom of perhaps some wildlife
or something like that We'll see whether this camera can turn its hand to astrophotography
and whether it perhaps it could be an alternative to buying a digital slr or an astro cam
okay so before i picked up the the bridge camera i thought through the sort of things i need from
a camera in order to take astrophotos. so i need to be able to set the camera to do a raw recording
format um i need to be able to set a focal ratio that's reasonably fast so f4 is pretty well the
slowest i want to do i want to be able to take long exposures maybe 30 seconds maybe a minute and
i want a decent iso so maybe 1600 3200 those are the kind of figures i'd use on a manual exposure
typically where i've got a wide field lens or even a a longer focal length lens on my digital slr so
with this bridge camera i didn't do my normal astro research i normally research stuff to
death online, read every review um but i'd established that you could do quite a lot of that
stuff and bridge cameras are as flexible as digital slrs in terms of setting up their
characteristics and their speeds etc etc but basically turns out that this particular camera
isn't as flexible as i thought so i guess you get the direction of travel this video um bye beware
this particular camera has some quite severe limitations on the combinations of length of
exposure and speed setting so it's meant that there are several modes in the camera there's
there's a scenic mode that can take 60 second exposures which sounds quite promising but in that
mode you can only use iso 80 and you can't change it so that's really no good if you use the manual
mode which we'll come on to in a minute you can set a reasonable iso 400 800 but you have quite
a limited maximum value of exposure only two or four seconds and there's a connection between the
the iso and the exposure so straight away having played with this a bit i would say that it's not
going to be as flexible as a digital slr maybe if you're looking at bridge camera do perhaps a
little bit more research than i did but hey let's carry on and see what we can do and how weget on.
okay so i'm just going to take you through a few of the settings
which apply to this particular bridge camera this panasonic fz82 in order that we can use it to take
some long exposures or well longish exposures so the first thing you've got to do is set it into
manual mode and turn the camera on and if we look around the back i try to set this up so you can
see the buttons i press now quite a few things you need to do on this particular camera not in
any particular order i guess but if we go into the menu there's a couple of options here that
we need to set so for example going to the camera settings here we need to tell the camera
the kind of frame that we're going to take
so we want the i'm choosing the standard aspect ratio the important thing here is is the quality
in this camera you've got a choice of different raw formats or non-raw formats i wanted to take
in this case a raw image which we might want a minute play stack for example afterwards
and it'll also take a jpeg as well so that's a very important setting on this particular camera
beyond that you've got to tell it a certain type of shutter setting here we go mechanical shutter
now that's because on this camera to get the maximum exposure you need to be on a mechanical
shutter setting and it's probably it on there and then we're going to set up for the actual
shot itself so imagine it was a digital slr we got a but this one we need to tell it that we're in
manual focus mode which again you do that on a digital slr we need to set the iso
so we've seen that there is a variation or a limit if you like a relationship between the iso setting
and the maximum exposure this particular camera lets you take so i've chosen to um let's go 800
iso set that what's next so we're going to use this wheel here which is basically going to
allow us to vary the actually no stop one thing before that we want to set the zoom because that
is another variable so we're going to go to 50 millimeters there we go then we're going
to come back to this button here and it should let us set the focal ratio f4 and also set the
exposure now for some reason it's only letting us do
iso 800 which wasn't really what i wanted i want a four second exposure so actually if i go back
just compromise between iso and maximum exposure i'm going to go back to 400 iso which is much
lower value than i'd normally use select that and then the camera will let me choose
four second exposure so it's quite a major compromise compared to a digital slr won't
necessarily apply on all bridge cameras but you need to read the specs on any bridge camera
you're going to use if you think astro is possibly something you want to do a fair amount of the time
so we set the exposure we set focal length we've set the focus mode we've set the aperture
now it's in manual focus mode when we go outside this is the sort of way that we're going to be
able to adjust the focus of the target so say we're pointing at some stars now or is practicing
now but this particular camera gives you a sort of scale and you can use these arrows up and down
fast up and down and you're moving the focus point between infinity the mountain and
a close-up target like a macro setting of a flower so once you've set the and you also have a
focusing area which you can play around with once you've set that focus you come out of this mode
and you're almost ready to go so last thing i'm going to do is i'm going to ask the camera to
rather than just click the um open the shutter as soon as i push the button i'm going to just
get it to wait a couple of seconds on a timer most cameras have got a sort of self-timer but
we've used this on your camera get it to wait two seconds now as with all astro play around with it
indoors or during the daytime before you commit outside so basically we got a f4
four seconds at 400 iso pretty pretty slow i know um manual focus telling me i've got a raw setting
thinking it's all good let's just try it out so gonna press the shutter button
wait for a couple of seconds one two three four and then again this camera forces you to do a
long shutter noise reduction which i think it subtracts some noise it's kind of like a bit
like a dark frame so i can't turn it off i don't think i can on this camera perhaps i'm wrong
apologies if i am but it's going to take another long exposure noise reduction frame automatically
every time i take a standard frame like this so that's the kind of setup this camera in theory
will now take a four second exposure at well pretty slow iso of iso 400 and we're going to see
whether we can make the best of that by taking lots and lots of frames we set it up for raw
and see if we can produce a final image by combining those frames but i don't know if
it's going to work certainly a lot more angry than using a digital slr where we could take
a much longer exposure in one go but hey let's see if we can get something out of this camera
okay so i've got the camera on a tripod and this is the lens at its widest angle
so it's 20 millimeters focal length all i'm going to do is zoom in and see how the video
manages as we go through the zoom scale so here we are that's passing 50 millimeters that's 200
still doing pretty well starting to move off center which is me not the camera
carrying on all the way to
well it's displaying 1320 millimeters
but either way that's that's maximum zoom on this bridge camera
and i think you've got a fairly decent view to move it's currently i think it's 82 full
not bad let's try some still shots
so same setup as for the video just got the camera on the tripod and using one of the auto modes and
you can see on the wide open that's the size of the of the image frame as we zoom in yeah maybe
you could adjust the exposure a little bit better perhaps a little bit of tricky lighting conditions
but the camera copes pretty well with picking up some still images of the moon at different
focal lengths no problems there and similarly the colors capture quite well if you uh take daylight
shots as as in this case here where the moon is just rising over some trees and then finally a
different phase you can play around and get some pretty nice or crescent shots easily
you've got the manual focus is always a little bit tricky when you get into the lower light but
i would say you can get good still images of the moon with this camera
so deep sky i've started set on the manual mode four second exposures and you can see that it it
will take up to three shots like this for each click of the shutter after which you've got to
start again and each time it's taking a an equivalent length a four second noise reduction
frame after each uh each light frame so really what i did was i took took quite a few minutes
of that and and stacked them all together using deep sky stacker the usual sort of process
i do for deep sky images and this is the result so well i'd say it's nothing special you can see
orion you can see some color in the nebula but i'd say compared to what you can easily
get with a digital slr and a wide-angle lens the image quality is only okay the pinpoint
stars are hard to achieve with focusing and you can't export the video easily onto a laptop to
get the focus right so the result is i'd say only okay and then after that try setting the lengthy
exposure the 60 second iso 80 just to see what i can get and these are single frames yeah they're
not terrible if you don't look too closely but even with going through paint shop in this case
and brightening up the image they're basically very grainy you can see the main constellations
you've got the pleiades you've got orion and yeah off axis the the lens shows that it really isn't
isn't as good as you're going to get with a with a standard sort of lens that you might put on
like a nifty 50 or most lenses for digital slrs off axis this one really isn't as good
okay so what are my thoughts well i'd say some you win and some you lose and overall i think this one
is a loss i say don't go out and buy a budget bridge camera like this if you primarily intend
to use it for astrophotography if you've already got one then have a look at its specifications
and see if that particular model lets you set a long exposure maybe 30 seconds or more with a high
speed rating of 800 1600 and with the shutter wide open if it does we'll put it on a tripod
play around with the focusing till you you you're sure you've got it right and see what you can get
taking pictures of the night sky but it probably won't be easy and i think you're gonna get a
better result with the digital slr so overall our bridge cameras a good alternative to digital slrs
for doing astrophotography and i'd say no they're much better on other targets okay so thanks for
watching i hope it's been useful if you haven't already subscribed to Jenham's Astro then please
click the link and i look forward to doing some more astro videos soon okay thanks for watching