This’ll be a funny one! At least to me. I just walked through my „studio” pictures from the past and some of them definitely made me laugh, I hope you’ll enjoy this post as well! You know, I’ve never possessed much photography knowledge before I bought my very first camera in 2018. With that purchase I’ve tried to hit ’em all - meaning that the camera should be pretty fine in capturing a landscape (in my case a collecting site) and it’d better make good macro photos as well while it needs to be light and compact and easy to handle… Well, in hindsight I’d say to myself: good luck! In the end I feel I made a pretty good choice for a beginner but I’ll walk you through the main milestones.

The camera

I’ve bought this Panasonic LX-100 (Mk I) in February 2018 after a couple of weeks long research. My expectations were as you just read above - to "hit 'em all". But as the wisdom says: „Oh but reality kicks everyone in the teeth sooner or later”. And it’s not why I say it because it’d be a bad camera! On the contrary, for the compact size and permanent lens I got basically everything I could for the pretty penny I spent. But soon I realized that instead of shooting photos at the localities I’m going to need to shoot pictures in the „lab” to be able to present the rocks at hand. So I quickly realised that I bought a bicycle for a motorcycle race. Oh well, coming with a seeming disadvantage I could learn a l-o-t about possibilities, my needs and the capabilities that the camera brings to the table. Let’s see what they are!

Make decent photos of bigger-than-tiny objects

In the reviews I’ve read about it was one of the advantages. They claimed that this camera is moderately good for both landscape and close-up photography. As it turned out it is true. It’s pretty good at capturing portraits and scenery but in the meantime my needs shifted from those areas to close-up/macro photography. For that purpose though it has its limitations. No matter if I’m in manual or automatic macro mode it can’t get a clear shot on a subject closer to the lens than 30 mms and it can’t be hacked by moving further away from the object and zooming in - it just changes the perspective slightly. Eventhough my „studio” consisted of a shoebox and two different light temperature emitting lamps at the beginning I was pretty satisfied with some of the pictures I managed to shoot. But god damn - I shot photos in a shoebox with those two lamps! Well, I guess it could’ve been worse..

The camera itself is very light, compact in size and it’s pretty robust - you can get a good grip on it and it’s easy to handle even in changing circumstances. It has some amazing features I wasn’t aware even exist - one of those is the „tracking” mode when you select a subject on a scenery and no matter where you move the camera or where the subject moves the focus remains on it. That’s one of my favourite features and it helped me take pictures of the minerals when I started out. At that time of course I didn’t even hear about stacking and the like. I tracked the subject, moved the lightsources to reflect the crystal faces, pointed and shot.

Control and lighting

If I wanted to make a selfie though (which is hardly ever the case) I didn’t do it the conventional way. (Not like shooting selfies with a camera was ever conventional...) I found out how to control the camera remotely with my phone. Probably it was the first occasion that I read the user’s manual other than those of medicines! This is my favourite feature and yes, you’ve guessed correctly - it’s not because of the selfies but because of minerals! The remote control comes in very handy because I can manually adjust the basic properties like ISO, white balance, etc. and most importantly the focus distance without a touch. The only thing I need to decide is the aperture and the shutter speed. After experimenting for some time I could handle the focus stacking and because of the fact I didn’t own a camera stand the remote control was a huge support.

At the time (see the picture of the Dioptase above) I started dedicating more of my time to explore mineral photography I first used a very advanced lighting setup - at least compared to the „Studio 1.0” shoebox horror scene with those streetlamps. But neither was this setup long lived. I wasn’t satisfied with the LED lights and the arrangement of them (35 LED lights in the front, 35 in the back of the upper lid of the box). So I took a knife, cut the LED strips, glued them to a cardboard piece, attached them to a cardboard frame and covered the light path with wax paper to enhance diffusion. And tada-daaa! Improvement has been made! Eventhough I'm still far from reaching the quailty photos I'm aiming at I've come way further than I thought in two years - and that's not everything! Stay tuned for Part 2.

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