Last month I spent a few days in St. Augustine at Florida’s Birding and Photo Festival. I took the Lumix S1R along even though I knew I would be shooting predominantly with the Lumix G9 and the Leica 100-400, an ideal bird photography combination. I was also hoping to try out the Sigma MC21 and some of the long glass that Sigma makes – more on that in future posts. For my very first shoot I decided to lave the G9 behind and just use the S1R with the Lumix Pro (Leica certified) 70-200mm f/4. Boy was this a great combination. The following images are an example of what impressed me most.

I am a strong believer on exposing to the right to maximize the ammout of data captured and this root image is an example of this technique.

The image below is of a Roseate Spoonbill that had landed near some alligators to drink water.

Typically I will adjust exposure, white /black points, highlights and shadows to get the image to what it looked like. These adjustments are shown in the screen capture as below.

As the composition was limited by the focal length of the lens I decided on a tight crop while maintaining the reflection as in the image below. The original image is 8368 X 5584 pixels and the cropped image is 1934 X 2528. Though not exact it is close to a 2X crop or the equivalent of a micro four third sensor. This provides a field of view equivalence of 400 mm.

Seeing the detail and the quality of the cropped image, I went a step further and cropped further to 1934 x 1434. This is approximately another 50%.

In my opinion this is a perfectly good image and useable in and digital competition as most competition require the image to be 1400 X 1050 px.

So why not take it one step further. A severe crop of the neck and head.

To further test the quality of images from the S1R, I took this small jpg image above and resized it to 1050 px high.

Using the same original jpg image a further resize was done to 1920 X 2678 px. This is more than sufficient for any screen/monitor display and any photographic competition.

ull disclosure, I am a Lumix Global Ambassador and use Lumix cameras and lenses for my photography. I will say that after using the S1R for a month, in my opinion, it is an exceptional camera and the best digital camera I have used to date.

The LUMIX S1R is Panasonic’s new 47.3-megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor camera.