G7 camera test - Weymouth

[TrueIndigo]

Recently visited Weymouth again and shot another test there in the harbour, this time with the Panasonic G7. The lighting situation was a very bright day with hazy blue sky, and I kept an eye on the live histogram to avoid highlight clipping as much as possible. Most shots were made with a Panasonic 25mm lens, and a few close-ups using a vintage Panagor 135mm - both lenses were at f2.8 throughout the day with 3x stacked ND filters (2x ND4, 1x ND8). The 135mm shots looked a bit soft compared to the very sharp and modern 25mm, so I sharpened those a bit in post so they would not look so different (they still do, though!). Made some very slight luma channel changes to a few of the shots, but there's very little colour changes here - saturation looked good straight from the camera and I was happy with the white balance choice. I attempted to compose similar shots to the camera test I made here several years ago (using Magic Lantern RAW on the old Canon 50D), and thought it might make an interesting comparison. With that earlier RAW video test, I'd been impressed that Adobe Camera RAW could effortlessly bring blue skies out of a seemingly plain white skyline. Though this time (perhaps by having the in-camera curve set to -2 Highlights, and helped by the ND filters) I thought the G7 image straight from the camera held together quite well in this bright and contrasty situation. My camera settings are still in a state of flux, but the essential details of this test were:

Picture profile: Natural (Contrast 0, sharpness -2, NR +5, Saturation -3).
White Balance: Kelvin values (4,500, Green +3).
Highlight and Shadow: Highlight -2.
ISO: 200 (for all the shots).

Here is the YouTube link:

 

In case of interest, here is a link to my previous Weymouth Harbour camera test shot in ML RAW on the Canon 50D:

 

Music comes from Eric's collection - the track used is 'Bitter-Sweet-Goodbye'. His EOSHD thread is here:

 

[mercer]

Nice work. I think I like the 50D version better but you did a great job with the G7 footage. 

[TrueIndigo]

There's something about the older cameras, isn't there? :-)

 

[TrueIndigo]

Here's the colour graded version, produced in After Effects, using the Color Finesse plug-in. The YouTube contrast looks more harsh than I saw when I was actually grading it, and the shadows I fought to keep have gone to hell here. Oh well!