The sky was an amazing shade of blue today. The photo below is straight out of the camera (DMC-FX520), with no polarizing filter! No HDR or other post-processing. Yet such a deep blue. So nice.

It was such a beautiful day. If only I didn't have my design project to finish, I'm sure I would have been running around like crazy taking pictures of things.

I need to give my DMC-G1 a workout sometime soon, but I'm actually quite amazed at what the FX520 is capable of still. The 25mm equivalent lens is wide enough for some interesting perspective shots.

Speaking of wide-angle, that's actually one thing I realized sometime ago. That is, wide-angle lenses aren't necessarily and exclusively for "fitting everything in the frame." While for party or group shots, that's true, but a more interesting creative possibility for wide-angle lenses is perspective isolation.

We all know that fast lenses allow for subject isolation via shallow depth of field (aka the "SLR-ish look" some might say). But a wide-angle lens gives you subject isolation via perspective stretching.

Telephoto lenses compress the scene, while wide-angle lenses stretch or expand the scene.

Unfortunately, the widest angle lens I have is the fixed lens on my FX520. The widest lens I have for my G1 is the kit 14-45mm lens, which is somewhat wide at a 35mm equivalent of 28mm, but still not wide enough for the true perspective stretching that an ultra-wide-angle lens will give you.

But alas, the Panasonic 7-14mm lens is like $1500 or something. So, I probably won't be shooting with a lens like that any time soon.

In the mean time, I wonder what kind of interesting photography compositions I'll be able to create with my existing kit of 14-45mm, 50mm and 45-200mm (effectively 28-400mm in 35mm terms).

I'm looking forward to our upcoming grad trip. I shall be filling up my hard drive soon enough. And who knows how huge of a RAW processing backlog I will get.