One of the things I enjoy doing in Amsterdam is joining some friends on a Photo Walk. One of the busiest members of Meetin Amsterdam is Michael and he arranges these every month or two. The downside to a photo walk is that there is sometime no chance for anonymity. When one person finds an interesting viewpoint, 3 or 4 others will try it too....at the same time. The passersby just have to deal with it.
It all started with a single blog post on TheLeggett.com. A post about a new lens coming out from Noktor, a 50mm/0.95. Incredible. The images that he linked to were pretty cool, but they used this system I hadn’t shown any interest in up until then: micro four-thirds. I know nothing about it. So I started researching a little. Nothing really jumped out at me until I noticed the Panasonic GH1. Hmmm…
In the background, I have been impressed with some of the amazing videos coming out of the Canon line of cameras; always hoping that Nikon would finally get into that game as well. But it just doesn’t seem to happen. As the owner of a few incredible Nikon lenses, I really wasn’t interest in jumping ship for something that I am sure Nikon will eventually wake up to. But still, those videos are incredible.
And that’s why the GH1 looked so interesting. The GH1 does full HD: 1080p at 24fps. Hmmm. But new lenses…ugh. And then it got more interesting. There happened to be a post a little while ago talking about the new adapters from other mounts to the micro four-thirds. In fact the Nikon version even has an aperture ring to accommodate for the newer Nikon G lenses, like my 50mm/1.4. Well, that becomes very interesting. So then I started looking around for good examples of the GH1 in use with both the stock lenses as well as either Canon or Nikon SLR lenses.
One of the first that I saw was this amazing film by Philip Bloom that was part of the GH1 launch:
Wow. But then I looked for videos by normal people. People not in the film making business.
One of my favorites on YouTube turned out to be this amazing little short
Then I fell upon a few videos on a site called Exposure Room. In fact the series that totally sold me on the GH1 was a trio of videos from Joshua Morin’s Christmas vacation trip to Egypt. Here is the first one, but I definitely recommend going to the site and looking at the other three.
When I saw that one of my preferred shops in Amsterdam had it in stock, I decided to take the plunge. Now this was about 6 hours after I initially learned of its existence. I stopped by Fotobooms about 20 minutes before they closed and walked away with the GH1 with the kit lens, a 14-140mm/4-5.8. Time to start playing.
I have now had the kit for about 3 days. Its fantastic and I am shocked that the videos it produced came from my hands. But I clearly have no idea what I am doing. I am using different video editing programs and I have even less of a clue about how to edit anything. But I made a first attempt at a video and have posted it to Vimeo. Its about 4 minutes long but really should be cut down to 40 seconds…but I posted it so that in 6 months I have a starting point I can reference to see how far I (hopefully) have come. Check it out here:
Monday, July 26, 2010 at 9:33AM 
