Panasonic Lumix FZ300 does ocean swims 5 January 2022

 

Well not literally.  The FZ300 can’t actually swim in the ocean or anywhere else. But it does have a greater level of weather resistance than your average camera. This is welcome when one is standing in the water trying to photograph swimmers with salt spray flying about.

Ocean swims are a great tradition of Sydney’s beachside suburbs. Each event attracts hundreds of entrants filled with joyous anticipation at the prospect of swimming up to 2 kilometers through breaking waves.

The line-up of entrants is egalitarian, ranging from 10 year old children who are fortunately not burdened by helicopter parents to octogenarians.

It’s great to see ordinary people with no great pretensions to athletic prowess taking on the challenge.

I found the Lumix FZ300 very suitable for the task of photographing the starting sequences. It is compact and inconspicuous. It won’t break the bank if one of those waves knocks me over and dumps the camera in the water.

It has a zoom for rapidly changing angle of view. It is fast and responsive which it needs to be as there is a window of about six seconds to photograph each group of starters.  And the AF can keep up with the action.

I always use this camera with a 52mm protect filter on the lens and the lens hood in place. Working in the edge of the surf  like this dumps a load of salt onto the filter in short order, requiring fairly frequent cleaning.

Subject brightness is extremely high on a sunny summers day at the beach but brightness range is moderate. The is a lot of light coming down but also a lot reflecting back up off the sand and water.

I use a SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB 170 MB/s memory card for rapid file handling.

Settings:

P Mode

AFC on the lever

Stabiliser on, Auto ISO, Burst Mode M with live view (6fps), 1 Area AF Mode, Shutter type Auto.

The camera generally performs very well in this type of situation. However it can sometimes mis-focus when pointing directly into the light, in this case on the ocean side, with masses of very bright specular reflections off the breaking waves and spray.  Lumix DFD CDAF is generally very good and the version in the FZ300 is better than some others but it is not always reliable when presented with many bright specular reflections.