hello i'm Graham Houghtonand welcome to this video which is a new series looking at the
panasonic lumix FZ80 or 82 bridge camera now i did promise this series to run early in January
but if you're a taker of my newsletter from my photographic blog you'll understand some of the
reasons why i haven't been able to produce this video until now so in this video i want to look at
the camera itself look over some of the controls look cover some of the terms that i'll be using
in this series and i'm trying particularly not to get too involved with the technical aspects
of this camera i've got loads of more other videos on this channel regarding the offset 8082
which do go into a lot more technical detail but this one is for new users to this camera
or people that are struggling to try and get decent image quality from it so i'm going to
be using very little technical jargon if you want to know more then have a look at my photographic
blog there'll be lots more explanations on the technical terms and the reasons why we adopt
some settings for this camera over others so this is the fz8082 it's probably one of panasonic's
most popular bridge cameras because of its price and it's a 1200 millimeters telephoto capability
it does come with a few disadvantages and you probably discovered those already when you're
trying to use this camera for example there is no remote jack so you can plug in a wide remote
release so if you wanted to take pictures on a tripod you have to use the self timer for every
shot so that's a bit of a disadvantage you can use the smartphone app but you probably find
there's too much delay between taking the picture and being able to view it and taking the next
pictures the fact that you can't plug an external microphone into here is limiting if you want to
take decent video 1080p mode for the camera is not very good it's a pretty pretty low bit rate if you
do switch to 4k you incur a little bit more crop it zooms in a little bit more into the picture
you're taking but the quality is very good and you'll be seeing that when we shoot video now
there are a couple of modifications you can make to this camera to make it even more user friendly
one of them would be to fit a nikon dk20 rubber eye cup to the evf the uvf is quite hard plastic
and is not very good when you're trying to take pictures so fitting that nikon dk20
hood on here does improve the feel of the camera the other one you may have noticed is the evf
diopter adjustment wheel on the side it tends to jump
once you've set the diopter to your own eyesight you'll probably find that that moves every time
you take a picture so there is a modification i've got there which is to put some black adhesive tape
over the wheel to lock it in place and you'll find that it stays in position and the other one you
may notice here is the addition of a lens hood now this is a wide angle lens hood um it's one
iphone that does not vignette when using at the wide angle position i don't use any additional
filters on the lens here i find that filters can degrade the image or give you ghosting so i don't
use any filtration a microfiber cloth or a lens pen is all that's needed to keep that lens clean
and with the addition of this wide-angle lens hood once you screw that into the filter thread
it does afford some protection to the front surface of the lens so you're not likely to
damage it it also gives you that nice shielding when you're taking landscape pictures to stop the
reduction in contrast that you get sometimes when the light hits the lens obliquely this lens herd
has a facility here to fit an 82 millimeter filter so ideally if you're using for long exposures
and you want to use neutral density filters you can screw an 82 millimeter neutral density into
the front of here and enjoy some long exposure photography and again with things like circular
polarizing filters you can actually improve the reflection on water or the reflection foam foliage
you can actually subdue that using a circular polarizing filter and we'll talk about that as the
series progresses having a look around the camera at some of the most important features the main
one here is the mode control dial and that is the one where we will set the mode of operation from
this camera and it has the manual shutter priority aperture priority program auto intelligent
auto the scene mode the creative filters mode panorama mode the custom setting and the manual
video control so that is the main dial that we'll be using throughout the series to change from
one mode to another on the back of the camera is the dial which is a push in
and rotate allows you to switch between operations such as changing the aperture and changing the
exposure value compensation and the dial allows you to change the value that you're controlling
on top of the camera we've got our shutter release and our zoom lever which goes from
wide angle to telephoto we've got the function one and function two buttons which you can program to
your particular needs and there's also the red record button now you notice here i've
put a little jewel on the top of that button so it's a little bit more tactile when i'm trying
to find the button to film so you can actually find that button without struggling for it so
that little modification is something i've documented in my blog as well
on the other side you've got the pop-up flash facility so that pops up the flash
and you've also got the replay button and the other buttons lvf which switches between the
lcd screen on the back of the camera and the electronic viewfinder so that button is the one
which will switch over between either using the either level viewfinder or the lcd display
on the bottom of course you've got the tripod mount it isn't on access to the camera so if you
are taking things like panorama shots sometimes the node points which is the center of the lens
shifts and you don't get a good stitch but you can put a plate on here to get that lens back on
the optical axis if you need to and again i'll discuss that further when we look at landscape
panoramas in the bottom of course here we've got our battery and our memory card and again
it's an sd card so you can use standard sd or standard sd hc or standard hd cards depending on
the capacity you need and whether you're going to be shooting video or not with this camera
in yesterday's video the lighting kept changing so it was impossible for me to continue shooting
the scenes that i wanted to because i wanted to show relative differences so hopefully today's
lighting is going to be more consistent the sun's out bright there's very little clouds in the sky
so we should be able to do what i wanted to do in this part of the video i want to look at exposure
and what the component parts of exposure are to make up your image if you are reading photography
magazines or you've seen other tutorials you've probably heard mention of something called the
exposure triangle which traditionally covers something like the aperture the shutter speed
and the iso as the three parts of the triangle but i like to throw a fourth dimension into
that and that is light without light you aren't going to get images anyway and light has some
particular properties which can make or break an image for example in bright sunlight there might
be too much tonal range that's the difference between the brightest highlights and the deepest
shadows for your set 8082 to capture and you're going to have to make a compromise whether you
want to see detail in those highlights or you want to see detail in the shadows and whichever
you choose you're going to have a compromise if you take exposure for those highlights the shadows
will be dark and you won't see detail if you want to see detail in the shadows the highlights will
be totally burned out and you have to accept that there are some ways of mitigating it from some
lighting situations and we'll probably need to use one of those in today's video so i'll show you
that when we get to it so looking at those three aspects of the exposure triangle if you like the
first one i want to debunk is aperture now it's true that aperture controls the depth of field
of an image and with the depth of field that's a front to back sharpness you see in an image
but with these small sensor cameras the 1 2 13 sensor camera which you have in the fz 82
you'll find that there's an inherent depth of field there which is fantastically large and even
at f 2.8 you're getting the equivalent depth of field that you would see on a full frame camera at
f 11. so when you see these photographic magazines saying shoot your landscapes at f11 to f16
really what you're saying is with the fz8082 if you can use f3 uh 2.8 or a 3.2 you're going to
get the equivalent depth of field that they're asking you to set in the full frame situation
so just in case that audio isn't unintelligible because of the helicopter going above if you're
using the widest aperture of this camera f 2.8 at the widest angle setting you'll find you've
got sufficient depth of field there for all your landscape needs you're going to have everything
from foreground to infinity sharp as you can see in this picture here i've shot in a church yard
where i'm only standing about two feet away from this gate and you can see the writing on the gate
is sharp and the background is sharp and i shot that at f 2.8 so you can see you've got tremendous
depth of field you don't need to worry about using small apertures for your landscape pictures with
this camera you will be rewarded with better pictures using the wider or 3.2 or f4 aperture
rather than the f7.1 or f8 where you're going to be running into a phenomenon called diffraction
which does soften the image the second component is going to be the shutter speed and shutter
speed allows you to control the amount of subject motion blur that's in your image so that if you
want to create silky smooth waterfalls you use a long exposure so half a second or one second
if you want to stop motion like you are good for wildlight or if you put film on birds or you're
taking sports you want a fast shutter speed in the order of 1 250th or 1 500th to arrest any subject
motion blur and give you nice sharp images so the shutter speed allows you to control that and the
other component there is the iso but i'd like to take away iso and say right lock the camera down
at the lowest iso the notifier saw the camera which in this case is iso 80.
once you start to go above iso 200 you notice your images start to take on a model appearance
you start to see grain you start to see a loss of sharpness so if you want to make large
enlargements you can't from those sort of images taken at those iso settings so it's possible to
use this camera even in today in a woodland scene with quite a lot of double shade to use iso 80
and get some images which are very good quality and you'll see that very shortly so if you can
just lock iso at 80 and forget it and you'll be using aperture priority or shutter priority to
capture your images and in most instances i'll be using just aperture priority and setting
the camera to something like f 2.8 and let the shutter speed be controlled by the camera exposure
let me take you through a couple of shots that we're going to be taking here one is this scene
here with all the line of trees going right into the horizon i'll take them at f 2.8 and i'll take
them at f 7.1 and f 8 and you can see there's very little change in the amount of depth of field but
what you will see is a change in sharpness between the f 2.8 setting and the f 8. so you can see
around about f 2.8 f 3.2 is going to give the sharpest images from this camera
then we're looking at shooting some plants which are in bright sunlight and again this contrast
range is exceeded that the camera can cope with and i'll be showing you how to use fill flash
to reduce the shadows and get that contrast range back under control so it's a lot to do
a lot to cover so let's get started i'm going to just take a few pictures here at the moment
uh of scenes around the woodland they're all going to be taking that iso 80. they're all going to be
handheld and they're going to be using the widest aperture f 2.8 at the widest angle position and
you can see the amount of depth of field you get and the sharpness of the lens will give
you roundabout f 2.8 f 3.2 so let me get started for the first shot i'm going to capture these logs
that have been cut down you can see the depth of field i've got from the front of these logs to
uh infinity in the background there i'm going to shoot at f 3.2 the camera set
to iso 80 i'm in aperture priority mode so let's just have a look at the first shot
and i'm going to focus on the front of the logs so that's going to be the principle point of focus
so focus on the front of the log let's just take that picture
and you can see from the front of the log to the trees in the background are incredibly sharp so
you can see the amount of depth of field you've got at f 3.2 and even using the base iso of 80
we've still managed to achieve a shutter speed of 1 160th of a second so that's fast enough for
handheld photography we can see here i've got this clump of daffodils which
are mainly backlit so they're casting quite a bit of shadow into the trumpets of the daffodils
and we'll probably find that that's beyond the range that this fz82 can capture
so i'll take a shot first of all without any fill flash and then i'll try fill flash and show the
effect now i've got a grass stroke growing grassy here so i'm just going to clean that up and i'll
take the first shot of this central bunch and again i'm going to be using something like
100 millimeters or 90 millimeters single point autofocus so i can actually select the bloom
that i want and that will be it so the aperture is f 4.7 and my shutter speed is 1 500 so that's
more than adequate to capture a good static image so let me take the first shot
now i'm going to pop up the flash and because this is an in between the lens shutter it doesn't
matter whatever shutter speed the camera flash was so increased and that's the set case if you've got
an external flash as well so you can use this all the way up to a 2000th of a second without any
synchronization problems so i've got the flash dialed in and let me just take that picture
now that's a little bit bright so i'm going to back off the flash uh power so i'm going
to the flash setting and currently it's at plus 130 degree from the last time i used it so i'm
going to go to minus 1ev so that reduces the flash power and that will reduce the amount of
fill flash that the camera has been applied let's try that again
and again that's just a little bit bright so i'm going to go to -2
i only want to effectively add a little bit of fill flash not
provide enough illumination for the picture so
that's much better well that's it for the first part of this new series covering the panasonic
lumix fz82 camera i hope you find some other content useful now in part two i'm going to
be showing you how you can modify the way an image looks by use of the photo style menu and the photo
styles can be standard or it can be vivid it can be scenery it can be portrait and i'll show you
the differences in each one of those and what you can expect from them and now you can tweak them
to your own specific needs i'll also be looking at how the camera metering circuit works so if
your exposure is not correct there is a way you can correct it by using what's called exposure
value compensation and i'll show you how to access that and how to change it and if you're still not
sure about that there is a way you can bracket the exposure so you can capture five images up a third
or two thirds or one stop in between so one of those you'd like to show you the right exposure
i'll show you how to set that up and use that so look forward to bringing you that in part two now
don't forget there's lots more information about panasonic lumix bridge cameras on my
photographic blog i'll put a link to that in the video description below and you can check that out
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the blog and also don't forget i do have a f said 8082 users manual available on amazon it's in hard
copy you can either get it in color or in black and white the black and white is obviously much
cheaper and it's also available as a free download if you purchase the book from amazon or you can
actually buy it as a download from my photographic blog page so check that out if you've not already
seen it so until the next time thanks very much for watching and of course if you're a new viewer
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again for watching please do take care and i hope to see you all very very soon goodbye for now