Picture a Day: Jul 18

When I scrounged through my old cameras wanting to resurrect some of them thanks to the "vintage cameras" trend, especially for ones with CCDs, my old Panasonic Lumix LX3 was one of them. I loved using it as my carry-around camera for so long, but as happens when new gear is acquired, older cameras get shelved.

Revisiting it has been great. I love all the tactile buttons and switches on it. I very much prefer cameras with physical controls, like my Fujis. I also appreciate the customization you can configure for function buttons and 2 custom spots on the mode dial, and, of course, the image quality. I really love how small it is and how great its dynamic black and white mode is. I'll have to play around with color settings, as the LX3 doesn't really have film emulations like new Fuji cams do, but if I do play around with filmic looks, I usually do that in post anyway, regardless of which camera I use.

I don't think I would categorize the LX3 as a "shitty camera" as the Digital Harinezumi 2 would be (see my recent older photo posts for examples), since it does have great image quality and is sort of "high" resolution relative to the DH2, though 10MP feels pretty low these days. I think it can still hold its own in this era of computational photography and mega-megapixel cameras.

Anyway, all that to preface that the above picture of my cat Sprite was taken with the LX3's "film grain" scene mode, which for some reason, lowers the max resolution to 3MP, along with putting it in dynamic black and white mode, and ups the ISO to 1600 for the grain. I could've gotten a similar result by leaving the camera at the max resolution, and using the camera's dynamic black and white mode, but perhaps their "film grain" mode emphasizes the grain by lowering resolution, who knows? I'm still refamiliarizing myself with the camera (and maybe using features I didn't use before).

I'm happy to play around with this camera again, so you'll likely see more pictures from it in the coming posts.