I’m not one for crowds.

I generally despise waiting in line, long walks from the parking lot, long waits to use the “facilities” and the other indignities of being “in the crowd” at large sporting events.

Usually, you can view the proceedings, just as well if not better, on television; all the while sitting in your comfy chair, just steps from a refrigerator and bathroom.

One event I do enjoy attending however, occurred last weekend in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

   I’m referring to the Vintage Car races at Watkins Glen International raceway, situated on the hills overlooking beautiful Lake Seneca.

   The drive, from my home in Pennsylvania is beautiful. There are early signs of fall in mid September that accentuate the gorgeous Finger Lakes scenery.

 

  This is a neat event. It’s run by the Sports Car Club of America, which means that the beer-swilling redneck NASCAR fans are replaced with beer, wine, and scotch-swilling masochistic amateur mechanics.

   These tend to be happy people, with perpetually sunny outlooks that delude them into thinking that it is actually possible to keep old British, Italian,  and even French cars, not only running, but running well enough to actually race. These are people who believe that the notoriously unreliable Lucas and Marelli electrical systems of their vehicles can actually be made to function properly. They tend to be hardy and upbeat and very hard to discourage. They dream of the day when the windshield wipers on their Austin Healey actually function at the same time the headlights are on…and actually in the rain.

   The weekend- long event feature a broad range of race cars, from ultra high performance Formula One and Can Am cars that scream around the track, to Bugeye Sprites and MGA’s that seem barely faster than a good garden tractor.

There can be some aggressive racing on this wonderful road course with good views from multiple locations.

Another attraction of the race is the accessibility of the pits to the fans. I suspect that a lot of the spectators are ex-participants; my group for instance included multiple former racers who seemed to know a lot of the current drivers. This leads to a clubby atmosphere. You can see a lot of interesting machinery in pit lane.

  People also bring their vintage cars for the car show that is held, and  afterwords, park them next to their camp sites.  Walking through the spectator areas, it is commonplace to stop and chat with a car owner about his 289 Cobra, or his lovingly restored, Daimlier Saloon.

   There are lots of interesting people, including Elliot, a fellow from Boston who with four other friends drove 5 very valuable cars: two hyper-expensive current exotics and three historic vehicles to the race.

They then parked them next to the track, and not only let people explore them…but encouraged it.

 Elliot, at one point in the evening, wanted me to appreciate the engine sound of his $250,000 Mercedes SLR. He insisted I start the car (which was not, I suspect “broken in” yet) and rev it furiously to the redline. What a neat guy. I have to suspect that Elliot understood the good-hearted and knowledgeable nature of this crowd, and knew no harm would come to his property.

  At night the racing stops and one by one campfires dot the camping areas trackside. People seem to move from site to site. Traditionally there is a bonfire near turn 7 with a lot of inebriated people and loud music. About 11:30 things turn quiet.

   If you love cars, and like me came of age in the sixties and seventies, this event is a wonderful way to connect with our automotive past, to see vehicles either restored or in racing trim that you haven’t thought of, let alone seen, in years.

It’s an opportunity to meet some very nice folks with a deep knowledge of, and love for autos and racing.

People with the optimism to believe, that if it rains on the way home… the wipers might work.

 

At the end of August, in the Appalachian highlands, there is often early evidence of the cool weather that is waiting its turn in the unfolding year.

Autumn touches the ridge tops far earlier than in the river valleys.

    Fall’s opening gambit generally occurs after a late summer hot spell. A strong line of storms usually heralds the season’s first outbreak of true Canadian air. One morning you awaken to a strikingly beautiful sunrise and a crispness that is shocking to one who is well acclimated to the warmth of summer. As the day progresses, the sharp reds of sunrise evolve into a deep blue, more like the skies of midwinter. There is a strong breeze. Small white clouds pass quickly overhead as if embarrassed to deprive us of the brilliant sunshine.

   The next several nights will be unnaturally cool. The day’s winds are becalmed; heat radiates quickly from the earth below. The fans and air conditioners so useful on warm summer nights will be stilled. Sleeping will be more comfortable, albeit with an extra blanket.

   There are potent changes occurring in the natural world. After the first few brisk mornings, other colors will accent the uniform green of the forest. First are the bracken ferns whose early autumn yellow contrasts with the larger cinnamon ferns that now assume a deep rust hue. Low in the canopy, small maples and dogwoods add splashes of red and yellow to the scene, sometimes one branch at a time. Wetlands offer a hiker the first preview of fall colors as the trees and shrubs in those places often change before their counterparts in better-drained areas.

   By mid-September, the hummingbird feeders in our yard hang abandoned, their usual dependents driven south by the early chill. Deer, which were scarce all summer, are beginning to reappear in the yards and gardens. Velvet-covered antlers distinguish the bucks, as they feed on acorns that now litter the lawn.

    On the ridge top scrub barrens, unprotected by the forest canopy, nighttime temperatures will tend to fall significantly compared to the surrounding woodlands. Hiking these areas on a fall evening, one can encounter rivers of cold air as they course though the landscape’s shallow draws, eventually to pool in the so-called “frost pockets.” Here, even in early fall; there may be freezes, which quickly melt in the bright morning sunshine.

    A walk along a lakeside trail in late September reveals further evidence of a transition occurring. One immediately notices the absence of frogs and tadpoles at the shoreline.  The latter have by now, matured into the former and have burrowed into the mud below the cooling waters. Migrating geese visit to feed and briefly rest. Along the shore, fruit still clings to blueberry bushes, though their leaves are already changing to crimson.

    Summer may yet fleetingly return for one more encore; bowing before it leaves the stage. Eventually the climate will change more definitively, and the forest canopy will explode with color. Fall has returned. Winter will not be far behind.

I’m adding a video here of one of my favorite musical groups of any genre.

  The band in question, Union Station, would be wonderful enough with the fine voice of their lead male vocalist Dan Tyminski. It was Dan and the band that scored with the iconic hit “Man of Constant Sorrow” from the Coen Brother’s film “Oh Brother Where Art Thou”,  lip synched as it was by George Clooney in that production.

 If you listen to them long enough, you come to appreciate that the band is a tight, extremely disciplined group with a polish that is more typical of a jazz ensemble.

When you add in the incredible Allison Kraus, with her astounding voice, backed by the group’s fine harmonies, the songs they sing easily transcend past performances by less talented groups. It is an almost embarrassment of riches , that Ms. Krauss, in addition to her almost otherworldly vocal talents, also plays a mean fiddle. 

Like Ricky Scaggs, featured elsewhere on this site, their obvious musicality draws people into bluegrass music that might otherwise be put off by earlier, and perhaps more “rustic ” practitioners of the craft.

So with my compliments, enjoy:

  

 Sometimes an image will surprise you in small but delightful ways.

   Sometimes it will be the inclusion of an unnoticed detail in a corner of the image that adds interest to the eye.

  When shooting on the water, it can be a feature under the surface, unseen through the viewfinder, but revealed courtesy of the polarizing filter you thoughtfully placed on the lens.

   In my case recently, it was blue light.

  I was camping with my daughter Brigid, a sort of last attempt to bond before she escapes to college life. We paddled our kayaks to an island in the Saranac Lake chain of upstate New York.

  Truth be told, she wasn’t real happy about this. Her brother escaped “dad duty” as he had brought two friends with him on our trip up north, and there weren’t enough kayaks. His time will come.

  I was going one way or another, and I’d like to think if anything, Brigid went to make sure that I didn’t capsize and drown.

 This particular trip is lovely.  You “put in” at a state sponsored site on the Saranac River and paddle through a series of ”ponds” prior to emerging into the vast waters of Lower Saranac lake. This is a large convoluted body of water, connected to the Middle Saranac Lake again by the Saranac River which reappears at the southwestern end of the lake. Multiple islands erupt from the lake floor. They vary in size from single rocks harboring a small pad of soil and a few conifers, to multiple acre-sized landforms covered in White Pine and northern hardwoods. This makes Lower Saranac a pleasant, visually interesting, largely sheltered place to paddle, though we did encounter fairly fresh winds and chop over the open sections we had to traverse.

   As they were loaded with gear, the ‘yaks rode lower in the water than usual, and it was somewhat difficult to “beach” them on the steep and slippery gneiss shoreline on the island we had chosen. Once secured, we unloaded and set up camp.

The NYS DEC maintain this area nicely. There are nice wide open tenting areas. There is even a privy available (definitely necessary, as these are busy sites)

Each site has a concrete fireplace, correctly designed to provide reflected heat for the cool Adirondack nights (thirty to forty degree nights would not be uncommon).

  I removed my Panasonic GH1 and two lenses from the dry bag where they resided for the trip over and waited for the light to get interesting.

  I had thought about taking some video, especially if the lake’s loons cooperated by calling prominently, but they were quiet that night. A few of their mournful cries were audible, but only in the distance. We contented ourselves with the warbling of wood thrushes, the chittering of the islands sole red squirel, and the occasional sound of passing powerboat.

   Periodically, dark clouds appeared, threatening rain. Happily it held off until much later, when we were finally zipped into the tent for the night.

  At dusk, the temperature dropped and fire seemed like a nice idea. I gathered wood and using the bark from a birch log we found already at the site, started one fairly easily.

  I spent a lot of time in the hour around sunset, shooting from various vantage points before returning to the campsite for good.

   There, Brigid and I sat around the fire as the light faded. The glow of the fireplace was evocative. I had no tripod on the trip ( yes, I know, big faux pas) so I was forced to set the camera at ISO 1600 (not the GH1’s best strength) to get reasonable shutter speeds.

   I asked Brigid to stay very still, and shot several frames with her in the foreground, counting on the image stabilization to keep things sharp. It was important to if anything, over-expose a bit (with a fire as the bright point it doesn’t matter so much), to avoid shadow noise. I looked at the image on the LCD in camp, it looked OK, and I put the equipment away for the night.

   I shot a few more images in the morning before we left the next morning but the sky was cloudy and the light mostly unremarkable. Still… there were moments.

   When I got back to my computer and was able to view the images in Photoshop, I noticed something I hadn’t seen in camp. In sharp contrast to reds and oranges of the firelight, was a soft blue glow evident through the trees at the shoreline, the fading blue of the night sky reflected in the water of the lake. I played with raw image a bit, pushing the exposure to a point that enhanced this effect (but only a bit). I was surprised and impressed with the camera’s dynamic range and metering which had allowed all of this to be recorded.

I like this picture. It reminds me of the numerous, and largely anonymous campfire scenes one sees for sale at souvenir shops throughout the Adirondacks.

  More importantly, it will always remind me of a very pleasant memory of time spent with my daughter before she embarks on a new phase of her young life.

BTW Brigid, Happy 18th.

  

Creating interesting images in midsummer, in the northeastern United States is sometimes a struggle. 

 Now I’m not saying that there aren’t subjects to shoot. There certainly are. 

    Streams, waterfalls, lakes, sunrises and sunsets all are available in midsummer the way they are the rest of the year. It’s just that everything is a fairly uniform green. And one day looks like the next. 

   There’s little change or evolution in the landscape, like in the fall with the leaves that seem to change almost day-by-day; or more obviously in the winter, when a snowstorm can utterly transform the scenery overnight. 

   There is however, a pattern of subtle, but predictable events in rural landscapes. There is for instance, the reliable blooming of summer flowers. If one pays attention during the year, you can begin to date an image by what blooms are present. 

  In early July for instance, here in the Moosic Mountains, purple thistles decorate the sunny edges of dirt roads throughout the region. Three weeks later, the seeds and their white parachutes are grasping at currents of air. 

Cardinal flowers decorate the channels of ephemeral streams that have dried up in the warm dry summer air. Blueberries, their blossoms long gone, ripen on the branches of trailside shrubs. 

  Sunflower blooms appear on their towering stalks sometime later, generally in August, and often well into September, their appearance roughly corresponding to the eruption of yellow in fields of goldenrod, the scourge of allergy sufferers everywhere. 

    On local farms, hay is being cut, depending on the summer weather, for the second or third time. This applies a sweet aroma to the summer breezes. 

   Sweet corn starts to be harvested. Heavy green fruit begins to pull the thin branches of tomato plants downward. Vast armies of wheat stalks bend in unison, to the wind of midsummer storms. 

   For me the goal of scenic summer photography, and for that matter, all seasonal photography is to capture the essence…the feeling of the moment that I and others experience in our little nook of the world. 

    I want my audience to view an image with all their senses, and share the full experience; for instance, the chill of a distinctly cool August morning in the Adirondacks, after a cold front passes. I surely want then to see the glory of the sun as it burns through the early morning fog.  But I want them to inhabit the scene, and to imagine the fresh smell of the dew-laden grasses, and to hear, as I heard that morning,  the distant sound of a loon on this obscure little lake, shrouded in mist (I guess now that I have a GH1, I could just take some video). 

   I want to convey the feeling as a rivulet of sweat runs down the back of your neck, in the lingering heat of a summer evening, on an uphill walk to an old abandoned farm. 

 Or the satisfaction of a quick Saturday afternoon mountain bike ride to a reservoir high in the surrounding hills. 

 Or the joy of a paddle on the Susquehanna River as the sun sets over the surrounding mountains. 

  I want to evoke the memory of hunting woodchucks at a friend’s farm on an August afternoon…or the joy of the amusements and food at a volunteer fire department “bazaar”. 

Images shouldn’t always just be technically competent and well composed. 

 I believe they need to tell a story.

   Like most people, I lust for the newest and best, whether we’re talking about cars, computers, smart phones or of course, photo gear.

I absolutely lust for a Leica S2, the new 37.5 MP, near medium format DSLR that, sadly, with a single “normal” 70mm lens runs roughly $28,000 dollars.

   Likewise for a Nikon D3x the 24mp DSLR which body only can be had for a more reasonable, but still rather princely sum of $7400. Given the state of the economy, and a kid going to college, it’s just not happening.

D3x Image by Nikon

   Having huge amounts of real resolution on a very high quality, big pixel imager has wonderful advantages in terms of maximum print size, and allows the photographer great latitude in terms of cropping. With so much data, you can crop away half the image and still make a respectable print.

Bodies such as the Leica and the  D3x are built for professionals and can tolerate a lot of abuse in the field. They handle wonderfully, and are designed to facilitate rapid changes in settings, mainly through external buttons and controls.

  With these wonderful attributes, there are also demands placed on the photographer who uses such wonderful gear. High resolution imagers require high quality glass.  You can’t just slap on the 18-55mm “kit lens” you got with your D40 on a D3x. In fact, that particular DX format lens will only illuminate a portion of the D3x’s FX format imager. To utilize the power of this fine instrument, you will need excellent quality full frame lenses.  Price-wise, think $1500+ for Nikkor zooms, though excellent primes can be had for much less. Leica glass is much more expensive.

  A second issue has to do with technique. High resolution means that fine detail is visible in the image, particularly the  details of how you screwed up. Failing to prevent minute camera movements caused by clumsily stabbing the shutter and/or by so-called “Mirror Slap” can reduce the preservation of details to the point where the capture resembles a much lower resolution image. Factor in to the price of the camera, the cost of a very high quality tripod and head, sturdy enough to handle this heavy camera body/lens combo and perhaps a remote shutter release, and you can easily add $800 to the price tag.

  Nonetheless, do I want these cameras? Yes, I do.

 Do I need them? Probably, I do not.

 First I can only print photos in my studio at 16”x22” or smaller. I have never been asked by a client for a print larger than 24”x 30”. High quality 12 MP imagers, well utilized, can provide very nice files for such prints.

 Enter another Nikon body… the D2x.

    I already own one of these, having purchased it roughly three years ago as a “Factory Refurb” for about 3K (it retailed for around $5000). Much to my chagrin, I now see them “lightly used”, on EBay for $800-$900.

The D2x was introduced in 2005. It was hailed at the time as a breakthrough product, and brought a lot of pro shooters back from Canon to Nikon.

 The body design formed the basis for the current D3 series cameras and thus is very similar in design, and equally stout.

It looks to be the last of the pro-level DX format cameras which means that it can utilize all of the lenses I own, whether FX or DX. Because of the 1.5x crop factor, it makes makes the long zooms shoot even longer. Dx imagers also have increased apparent depth of field compared to larger sensors which is great for landscapes, but can be a problem at times, for portrait work.

    Wide angle lenses on DX are another story, as they inconveniently get longer too.  There are however, some wonderfull 11-12mm wide zoom options available for DX format, getting us down to a 17-18mm field of view (full frame equivelent). 

    Another piece of good news for DX: their smaller sensors utilize only the center portion of a full frame lens. This tends to make good lenses shoot great.

IThe D2x has a cropped mode shooting 7MP files (more than enough for most photojournalism) at 8 frames per second, or it will shoot a full 12 MP image at 5ffp. This performance lags behind current pro Nikon offerings, but who cares…8 frames per second sounds like a machine gun.

It has extremely fast and accurate auto focus, and very reliable metering. It is compatible with Nikon’s newest flashguns using the i-TTL system.

  And, when used thoughtfully, it captures beautiful, detailed images. I tend to use it for landscape photography, but it is particularly useful for shooting sports in outdoor venues where the light is good.

It’s big disadvantage has to do with low light shooting. It produces nice work up to about ISO 800, when noise begins to set in. Later Nikon DX offerings like the D-300 do better with this, and the FX Nikons, such as my D-700, do much better. Happily, the noise seen in high ISO D2x images has a nice fine luminance noise (rather than blotchy color noise) that resembles the “grain” in old high sensitivity black and white film.

It’s really well built and sealed. I’ve stood on the sideline of a football game in heavy rain shooting the D2x paired with the equally rugged Nikkor 70-200mm VR with nary a worry about the equipment. When the rain stops, you just towel everything off, and keep shooting.

There are lots of other features that make “pro level” Nikons so wonderful to use.

So why talk about an old camera?

  If you’re a talented amateur, or person getting started on a pro career in photography, you may not have the $4500 to blow on a current Nikon pro body. $800 will barely by you a D-90 which is a very nice plastic bodied 12 megapixel DX camera, but no where near as capable, tunable, or rugged as a D2x. Nice as the consumer Nikons are, is there is an intangible joy to owning an instrument as nicely built and designed as a D2 series camera.

I will admittedly, continue to lurk on EBay, watching for D3x prices to fall into my range. It may be a long wait.

For now however, I’m very content with the Nikons I already own.

 

The new  photo above, was taken at one of my favorite local places: Hickory Run State Park, which is located at the very western border of the Pocono “Mountains” of Pennsylvania.

   It depicts the “Old Stage Road”, which runs through the park as a hiking trail but converts to a public road at the park’s border.

  Hickory Run is a fascinating place from a geologic standpoint. As I understand it, the park is situated on land at the very end of the  ice sheet that formed over North America 18,000 years ago

    The glaciated, “Pocono” portion of the park on the east is actually a high flat plateau with a mix of woodland and barrens species and the locally famous Boulder field (depicted in a photo published with the “Mountain Laurels” article”). As you travel west, the land falls off and with it, multiple streams tumble off the heights,  through a succession of lovely glens, and over countless small (and some large) waterfalls,  all flowing inexorably  towards the Lehigh River at the park’s western border.

  At places on the property, very dense pockets of second-growth hemlocks block out sunlight even in midday. This helps visitors to this park understand the descriptions  by early settlers quoted in in park’s brochures of the “shades of death” they encountered here.

   This was the description by colonists who travelled this wilderness centuries ago, fearful of attack by predators or aboriginal Americans, that they imagined were lurking among the vast groves of  white pine and hemlock, many of which may have been 2-300 ft tall, and 500-hundred years old.

Those trees are long gone now, logged out in the 18th and 19th centuries for timber and tannin. They have been replaced by ancestors that are by comparison, mere adolescents. Nonetheless, as you pass through these dark verdent sections, you can easily imagine the anxiety of travellers riding on open wagon, in a stage coach, or worse, on foot as they traversed this dark, seemingly endless forest.

But I digress.

  Unfortunately, the method I use to bring higher-quality images to the site does not appear to be available for the header image. I am stuck with less than crisp images at this location on the site.

  I’m working on it.

Sometimes , performances speak for themselves.

So it is with this video of the stunning German pop artist, Helene Fischer, whose voice , when applied to Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria, is a rare tribute by anyone in the entertainment community, to the waning traditions of European Christianity.

Though she is not an operatic singer, her tone and clarity are striking, which helps to make this gorgeous liturgical music more  accessable to this public audience.

Such a lovely and talented lady.

  

 I have always loved the Fourth of July holiday here in the USA. 

  I will say, that the holiday’s proximity to Memorial day in late May, always makes it seem that the summer is rushing by. Summer, after all, is very precious in the Appalachian mountains. In truth, there are two months left before Labor Day backstops the summer vacation season. After this we will have at least 6 weeks of glorious fall weather before things get brown and chilly. 

  Obviously this holiday marks a profound event in American history: the moment a people decided to stand against taxation and non-representative government. The risk taken by those involved, from the militiaman that stood side-by side against the indomitable British Army, to he founders themselves, are I think, severely under appreciated by modern Americans, save perhaps, those that currently risk it all in the service of our armed forces.

God bless them.
 

  At my home, high in the Moosic Mountains of Pennsylvania, we celebrate the holiday with great enthusiasm. I live in an old Victorian resort community with big old cottages, most built with multiple bedrooms so to accommodate family and friends in the summer months when the houses were open.
On this weekend in particular the houses fill; every one of the little summer bedrooms has a suitcase and rumpled bed; the sound of adults who grew up here, playing with the their children is pervasive and lovely as one walks in the afternoon. 

Since the 1890s, people come here for the same ends: to revel in the summer warmth, but sleep comfortably in  the cool night air, to swim in the lake, hike the trails, ride bicycles, play a little tennis, and to sit on the front porch for a cocktail before dinner. 

The climate is extremely unpredictable in early July. This year it’s going to be brightly sunny and around 90 degrees, though we’ve had years where the temps stayed in the fifties. On that holiday, the only one outside was the griller; the rest of us were inside, gathered around the fireplace. 

We also have a parade. I’m not sure how long it’s been going on, but apparently for 40-plus Fourth of Julys by the accounts of some of the older residents. 

The event starts at one pm sharp, so starting around eleven, we gather at one of the larger driveways in the community. A diverse group of vehicles participates, from bicycles, to tractors to ATVs, convertibles, and pickup trucks. The children descend, with tape, and crepe paper ribbons, little American flags and red white and blue pinwheels, and bunting. The children are very enthusiastic, they sometimes fail to understand that in order to drive a vehicle you have to be able to open the door, or see through the windshield. A little parental modification is sometimes necessary. 

Eventually with issues corrected, away we drive, to our community center, where we are met by the Fairview Township Volunteer Fire Department.
The department is very capably managed by several community residents who I think worry that our huge old wood frame homes are likely to be potential future “clients” for the firemen’s services. Happily for us, the department’s massive and impeccably maintained equipment rivals that seen in big cities. Their efforts in the recent past have saved at least one of these historic structures from complete immolation. 

The fireman help as young children and their parents are loaded aboard the pumpers and ladder trucks. Then we line the vehicles up, and the parade begins, on a route through the network of gravel roads designed so that all may participate. 

Now I have always tended to be a “parader” but there are others who traditionally serve as “watchers” standing by the roadside in little knots of people with flags and perhaps a camera, waving as the parade goes by. After all everyone can’t be a “parader”. The “watchers” tend to congregate in the same places year to year, ducking as candy rains down opon them, thrown by the gleeful children in the trucks and fire engines. 

It takes about twenty minutes to do the route, then return to the community center and disband. It’s then on to the lake for a community picnic, and later, hopefully, fireworks.
  

  In truth, it’s a small event in a small community in Pennsylvania. 

I love it, because in this neighborhood, we draw together as a community rather than sequester ourselves in our own fenced-in backyards, isolated from our neighbors. I would rather be here no matter what the weather, than at the biggest celebration in New York or Boston.

Undoubtedly, I’d have to be a “watcher” there. 

  After all, I am a “Parader”.

Even if you have a couple of digital SLRs, there is always a need for a small but capable camera; one that can be carried with you for unexpected photographic opportunities that crop up when you least expect it.

In the beginning of the digital photography era, digital cameras tended to be compact and fairly expensive, and aimed at photo enthusiasts. Though there were simple point-and –shoot models, there was a good selection of robustly built cameras with full controls and features such as the Nikon Coolpix 990 that I purchased in 2000 for around $900.00. The 990 was made of magnesium, and had controls and features not dissimilar to serious bodies like the F100 pro SLR. It had an unusual twisting body, a fine Nikkor lens with a modest zoom range, and features such as threads for filters. At three megapixels, it had resolution equal or superior to the hyper-expensive DSLRs of the time. To a person familiar with more serious Nikons, the 990 had obvious kinship, and was easy to pick up and use. Ditto the Canon G series (there is still a G 11 avaialble) and the Olympus C series (I owned a C-5050), which were serious compacts available for the users of their film SLRs. All these cameras had relatively large 1 1/8 inch imagers with around 3 million large pixels.

Now before I get too nostalgic, let me say, that these imagers were useful only for relatively small prints, and had very limited low light capabilities. The bodies however were serious, as rugged and controllable enough for pro use.  I saw a lot of photojournalists with Nikon F-5s in hand, but a 990 in their bag.

Serious compact cameras continued to evolve and improve though 2004, but a year earlier, Canon dropped a bomb, a budget digital SLR with an APC sized imager which was far larger than even the 2/3 inch imagers of the best compacts of the time. At about the same money as a Nikon 990, it was hugely more capable with fast autofocus, interchangeable lenses, six megapixels, and wonderful (for the time) high ISO capabilities. It sold like hotcakes. It was followed in 2004 by the even more capable Nikon D-70 with more performance, and a better standard lens. Suddenly, everyone wanted a DSLR. The market for the serious compact dried up and the genre disappeared.

In the years since, serious amateurs gravitated to interchangeable lens SLRs.  More casual photographers were offered a selection of products designed it seemed, by marketing departments with two main attributes: more megapixels, and more zoom capability.

This has resulted in offerings with tiny imagers sporting as much 14 megapixels with 400mm equivalent zoom lenses in plastic bodies the size of an Altoids box, for 3-400 bucks. Serious shooters understand that to be sold at that price point, imagers and lenses with such accelerated specs are unlikely to perform well.

An exception to this was the Fuji F series cameras which sported fine lenses, metal bodies and a unique large 6 MP sensor with unprecedented low light capabilities for small cameras. Still, they were compacts, with limited controls, limited to capturing only compressed jpgs… albeit high quality jpgs.

I used the F series for several years and captured a lot of images with them. The high quality of the lens and sensor was far more capable, than higher MP compacts. I still keep one in my pocket when needed.

Enter Panasonic. In 2008 they introduced the third of their LX series, logically called the LX 3, and serious shooters took notice. Finally, here was a pocket sized camera clearly designed for the serious amateurs and pros.

The LX 3 has several significant advantages over the Fujis. First, it shoots raw format, essentially allowing access to the unmodified data directly from the imager, without any input from the cameras processor. Raw files are unlike jpg files, where things like sharpness, white balance and contrast are “baked in” to the file and are more difficult to modify without image degradation. When I can, I shoot raw files exclusively.

The LX3 has a very rugged metal body, with a flash shoe compatible with my diminutive Olympus FL-30 flash. For an indoor event, I can stow each in a suit coat pocket, and shoot excellent quality flash images without the burden of a camera bag.

Panasonic reversed the trends of compact cameras in two ways. First, they increased the imager size, but reduced the official pixel count to a reasonable 10 MP. For high ISO shooting, it runs neck and neck with my Fuji F-31, which is still an industry standard.

The imager is actually larger than 10 mp. It allows the user to choose three aspect ratios, from a widescreen 16:9 to a square-ish 4:3 with out losing much in the way of pixels, and thus resolution.

Panasonic also used extraordinarily good judgment with the lens choice, specifying a fast f 2.0, 24-60mm equivalent imaged-stabilized Leica Summicron lens. To my eye, the lens is optically excellent, though issues of distortion are corrected digitally.

It also can capture 1280×720 HD video.

There is a large high resolution LCD on the back. Controls are cleverly designed to allow a shocking amount of manual control for a compact. Like the Lumix G series I have written about elsewhere here, there is a real time on-screen histogram, which is very helpful to judge exposure prior to tripping the shutter.

One downfall is the lack of a viewfinder, unfortunately pro forma for compact cameras these days. Panasonic mitigates this somewhat with a simple optical viewfinder, offered as an accessory, which slides into the flash shoe. It is locked into the 24mm focal length but allows you to aim the camera, stabilized properly against your face. It works, but to use it at longer focal lengths, it takes some getting used to.

Now I must say, that compared to the velvety smooth images produced by larger sensor cameras, particularly my D-700, the Panasonic imager is relatively noisy, even at ISO 100. SLRs tend to spoil you for smaller imagers. Small cameras are not the best choice for landscape work.  Still and all, in the hands of a clever photographer who understands its capabilities, features, and limitations, it can create wonderful images where other compacts would fail.

On the Panasonic internet forums, there is a lot of speculation on the LX3’s successor. I for one could care less.

If you can’t take good images with this camera, it’s not Panasonic’s fault.

9/28 11 Read my review of Panasonic’s update, the LX 5, here.