10 REASONS WE HAVE A CRUSH ON THE *GASP* POINT-AND-SHOOT LUMIX DMC-LX100
As I write this I am 10 days married to the hottie photographer Derek Mohninger. We were headed to New York for our honeymoon and wanted to do some street photography while we were there, but the thought of leaving our hotel in Long Island City over to Manhattan to stroll for entire days and nights with heavy DSLR cameras and lenses? Well, that kind of killed our buzz.
I really wanted to find a walk-around camera, something that achieved DSLR-type results but without the weight and expense.
For my personal work, I’m a bit lazy when it comes to photography systems. I already have a full bag of gear for my professional work. And I really didn’t want the bother of having to carry around a few different lenses in my backpack. The rangefinder mirrorless camera lenses might be light, but they ain’t cheap.
That’s when I took a look at my options for a point-and-shoot camera — something that would have sex appeal to photo geeks like us. I didn’t know of any other professionals who use a point-and-shoot for their walk-around/personal work so I took to the ‘net for advice. All the reviews I read kept pointing to the Lumix DMC-LX100. I’m sure I’ll get around to creating some sort of affiliate link for this camera, but for now we’re just sharing because it’s freaking awesome, and it’s making us very happy.
You might think the proof is in the pudding. But that is a lie. The proof is in the photos. So, have a look at the photos we took on our honeymoon. We like to dork around with artsy-fartsy stuff, and we used a lot of the creative techniques I’ll teach you on our YouTube show #GETCRAFTYPHOTOGRAPHERS (coming in the new year).
Now, without further ado here are the 10 reason we love this camera:
1) It LOOKS smokin’ retro sexy, just like an old-timey film camera, and has a similar look to its rangefinder cousins.
Here’s what ours looks like:
2) It features Leica glass. This glass has a world-class reputation for a reason.
3) f1.7 – Enough said!
4) 4k video.
5) 16.4 MP Micro Four Thirds Sensor. To be honest I don’t really know too much about the science behind this… but according to people who know about this stuff, this means it’s got a kick-ass sensor that will take high-quality photos.
6) It shoots RAW.
7) It has really awesome macro capabilities. We experimented a little bit and the bokeh was totally dope.
8) It has an actual Aperture ring! Like, around the lens!! Like, like, an old timey 35mm lens aperture ring. And it has an actual shutter dial. Like, like, an old timey 35mm actual shutter dial. And once you invest time reading the manual, you can pretty much do almost the same stuff you can do with your DSLR camera. To be honest, it was as complicated as heck trying to learn our way through the dense menu system to turn on back button focusing and to activate the movable focus area and to not have it turn to default mode when you turned the camera off and etc… But once we got the swing of it, we found it fairly straight-forward to operate. I really loved that I could shoot in full manual mode just like my early crush-on-35mm-slr-camera days.
9) You can buy neutral density or polarizer filters which is also pretty cool.
10) It has a fixed 24-70mm lens. I realize that’s a downfall for a lot of people. But for us, it was all we needed or wanted for doing street photography.
And those are just 10 reasons why we love this camera. There are more! Not only does the LX100 allow us the freedom to walk around unencumbered with tons of gear, it gave us the ability to play with techniques we love. No one asked me to write this. We just really like the camera.
