I drove Becky to work in Boston today, and after parking at the ***Otis House|http://www.historicnewengland.org/visit/homes/otis.htm***, I headed out to trek around the city, putting my new camera through its paces. I covered a pretty wide swath of the city, from the North End all the way over to Symphony Hall in the Back Bay. I must say, I’m quite pleased with the results. I shot today at my camera’s lowest resolution and lowest quality level, because my larger memory card hasn’t arrived yet… nonetheless, the camera still produced excellent photos. The 12x zoom came in mighty handy, and the optical image stabilizer worked just as advertised. Here is one of the best examples of the zoom capability. These photos were both shot from the same spot in Boston Common; the first with no zoom, and the second with full 12x zoom (zoomed in to focus on a spot on top of the John Hancock Tower, from the center of the first shot):

ggg|boston_20050313/P1000169|No Zoom|ggg

ggg|boston_20050313/P1000170|12x Zoom|ggg

Amazing! The rest of the photos (138 in all) can be found ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/boston_20050313?page=1***.

I’ve been wanting a camera with a bigger zoom lens for a while… and I’ve been wanting a camera with more features and controls… and I felt that a trip to a place like Russia called for a camera that could take it all in. So today I picked up the ***Panasonic DMC-FZ20|http://www2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/vModelDetail?displayTab=O&storeId=11251&catalogId=11005&itemId=71418&catGroupId=17168&modelNo=DMC-FZ20K&surfModel=DMC-FZ20K*** at Circuit City in Salem, NH. I had ordered it on the web a few days ago for in-store pickup. That way, I was able to get the web price ($30 cheaper than in-store), and by picking it up in New Hampshire I avoided both sales tax and shipping.

The biggest improvement with this new camera is the huge zoom lens – 12x zoom (36mm-432mm). It also has an optical image stabilizer, which helps cut down on image blurring when taking hand-held shots. You can read all of the rest of the specs and features at the above link if you’re interested.

To see just what a 12x zoom means, here’s an example:

ggg|grab_bag/P1000103|No Zoom|ggg

Shot with no zoom

ggg|grab_bag/P1000104|12x Zoom|ggg

Shot with 12x zoom (zoomed in to books from the center of the previous frame)

Pretty big difference! Having a big zoom lens opens up all sorts of possibilities… better candid shots, better framing and composition, bringing distant or unreachable subjects closer. Anyway, here’s the camera itself (taken with its little sidekick, the Powershot A70):

ggg|grab_bag/IMG_0237|DMC-FZ20|ggg

Next to it is the detatchable lens hood. When in place, this can help eliminate lens glare and protect the lens from the elements.

Right now, I only have the 16 meg SD card that came with the camera. It holds only eight full-quality (5 megapixel) shots. But I have a 512 meg card on order, and that will hold around 250 shots. Hopefully that, in combination with nightly offloading of images onto our laptop, will help us get lots of good photos when we’re in Russia (which is coming in just over six weeks!).

The agreement is that this camera has to last me for a while – I’ve had my Powershot A70 for less than a year and a half. But with the combination of the zoom and the advanced features, I think I’ll be satisifed for a while. I certainly don’t have the money to go and buy a full-fledged digital SLR and an equivalent sized zoom lens to attach to it.

Tomorrow, I’m going to hike around Boston a bit while Becky is at work, to put the camera through its paces. To get any decent number of shots saved on the 16 meg card, I’m going to have to go down to 640×480 resolution… but I’ll deal for now. 🙂

(P.S. The A70 is in perfectly good condition, but I’m not sure what I want to do with it yet. The FZ20 is certainly not a pocket-sized camera, so it would be nice to keep the A70 around for occasions when I didn’t want to lug a larger-sized camera… but on the other hand, the A70 isn’t all that compact. I could probably sell it, along with all of its accessories (batteries, charger, compact flash cards – all of which are unfortunately useless with the new camera). Eventually I’d like to get a truly pocket sized camera that could go everywhere, and ditch the in-between awkwardness of the A70 altogether…)