Overwhelmed with new Pan FZ20

[LStoner]

Hi all. Well I made my decision and bought the Panasonic FZ20 thanks to all your good advice and after looking at them in the store. I have no doubt I've picked the right camera and will use it for years to come.

If you could give me some advice though please. I can't believe all the capabilities this camera has and I'm looking forward to using them in the future, but right now I'm a little overwhelmed. If someone could suggest a simple setting to get started taking just pics of my family that would be great.

Also, I'm going to a concert in 2 weeks. Any suggestions on what I should set it on for that? I was reading in the owner's manual and I'm thinking Party Mode might be the way to go. What do you think?

Thanks to anyone who has advice for me!

-Lee Ann

[Nytmair]

I am picking up an FZ20 of my own in a day or two, so after I play around with it I'll post up with any suggestions I have since no one has responded yet.

-Dan

[judge9847]

Originally Posted by LStoner

Hi all. Well I made my decision and bought the Panasonic FZ20 thanks to all your good advice and after looking at them in the store. I have no doubt I've picked the right camera and will use it for years to come.

If you could give me some advice though please. I can't believe all the capabilities this camera has and I'm looking forward to using them in the future, but right now I'm a little overwhelmed. If someone could suggest a simple setting to get started taking just pics of my family that would be great.

Well, with my FZ10 I found it was best to set everything to Auto and let the camera strut its stuff. Then I learned to look at the settings the camera was coming up with in Auto mode and started to make my own wherever I could. It's one of the ways I explored the camera - and there's still stuff I haven't used or got round to using yet.

Do it in Auto and if the results aren't what you want, start making your own changes.

And you won't be at all disappointed with your camera but you will have to learn to deal with a lot of the settings in order to get the best from it. But that's at least half the fun. And there's always this site to ask any questions you've got.

[lumixfan]

One thing may be run down to nearest public library and read a book on digital photography when you get time. I read quite a few of them recently. National Geographic Digital Field Guide is also a simple one.

As Bob says, set default. Start taking pictures.
In outside you can change White Balance to Sunlight, Cloudy etc.

I found that reading Histograms is very useful in digital to get correct exposures. FZ20 has the live histogram capability. Very useful.

Also if you have a Camera Club in your area, try joining it. You will learn a lot by looking at other's pictures and interacting them in live

[Terracotta]

Now, when my partner got me an S414 I did this and for me it worked wonders! I set-up an 'interesting' target & do your best to control the scene, in my case a vase filled with glass beads, pebbles & water then top light with a std 250w workers floodlight finally blacking out all the windows. I then took a photo in full auto mode, and used those settings as a 'known good' state. From those settings I simply took one parameter at a time and changed them to see the effect. When I'd done that I started to put items onto auto mode to see how the camera reacted to the settings I'd used.

Though this is no substitute to talkin' to people who have been working with cameras for years and reading books on digital photography you sure as hell get to know your camera well. which, at the end of the day, isn't such a bad thing is it