A geek walked into the woods..

LyttleBryan June 30th, 2009

So I got my new camera. It’s the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1. This is the first rugged camera from Panasonic and all I can say is WOW. I love this camera. I really love this camera! I was actually really lucky to have it at all before this trip. It was due to be delivered the next day, but it was in the shipping facility. After putting out an SOS for information on facebook I got ahold of the shipping facility and had them hold it for me. A mad dash to North Knoxville to get it before the camping trip and all was fine…almost. Amazon shipped the card separately so I was stuck using a 512meg card for the weekend. This translates to about 70ish pictures at full resolution…not a good thing! I lowered the resolution for most pictures and I have to say, even at lower resolutions the pictures turned out very, very well.

This camera features much of the same rugged style features that my failed Olympus camera had. It’s waterproof (10′), freeze proof, crush proof, shockproof, and dust proof. In other words just about everything proof that I subject my digital cameras to. After my first run around with the Olympus Tough-8000 I was nervous about another new camera. I greatly feared the picture quality on this camera was going to be low too, but as you can see form the photos, it’s pretty good! I subjected it to just about everything I could this weekend except freezing it. I’ll have to stick it in my freezer later and let you know how it fairs! The pictures I selected really had no rhyme or reason to them other than to show what the camera is capable of. These aren’t meant to be comprehensive and I’m sure any professional photographer would shoot holes in them until they are blue in the face. However I’m not a professional photographer, I’m just a geek in the woods. On to some of the pictures!

These three pictures were some up close and personal pictures I took just to see how the camera could handle up close pictures. The mushroom and shirt shots were done without a macro setting while the one of my finger was done using the macro setting. Don’t worry, my finger’s fine! The shirt shot I thought was really great because you can see the actual stitching of the shirt which, in my book, is some really great detail!

This next picture shows the under water capability of the camera. Despite the contents of the shot, it actually served a purpose. Since my memory card space was limited this go around I was having Guen hold out her hands so I could get an idea of how far the flash would go. As luck would have it some minnows were investigating her at that same time. I liked the minnows in the shot so I decided to keep it. Thanks to Guen for letting me post it. At least, I think she said it was okay! hehehe

These last three pictures are both great pictures and they show the wide angle capabilities of the camera. The camera comes complete with a 28mm wide angle lense and 4.6 optical zoom. While the optical zoom is nothing to speak of, the wide angle lense made for some EXCELLENT photos this weekend! The first two pictures were taken from IN the river while I was floating around on an inner tube. It was nice being able to just strap the thing to my wrist not have to worry about it getting wet. I’m really fond of the 2nd picture looking at our campsite beach front property from the river. It really kind of shows the weekend I had and how wonderful it was! The third picture was taken from the edge of rock outcropping on the side of Virgin Falls. This was shortly before I took a little fall that left me with the finger you see above.

Well, there you have it. This camera gets two thumbs up from this outdoors person. I did my best to destroy it and it just kept coming back for more pictures! Expect to see a lot more pictures on the blog no matter where I go.

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