Waterfalls - Shutter Speed

How do you like your waterfalls? fast and frozen or slow and creamy? Paul went to Glenoe Falls with a camera, tripod and ND16 filter to find out!

Running these results past a few folk on Facebook and the Lumix User Forum showed that most people wanted an in-between result, one that shows movement - not frozen, but not too creamy either, achieved by a shutter speed in the range 1/15th - 1/100th. Paul is different in being happier with slower speeds of 1 second and longer. After 5 seconds the movement doesn't seem to change much - the result looks like the waterfall has iced up.

Sensor Size - It matters a lot!

So for £200 you can buy a camera with a 12 million pixel sensor, and 18x zoom lens, HD video and pretty much everything else you'll ever need. Or you could spend five times that on a DSLR that does quite a bit more and a lot less, weighs more, needs at least one more big lens to match the range, oh, and you'll need to bring along a separate video camera if you want to shoot the odd movie.

It looks like a no-brainer, but there is a big, big difference. It's the size of the sensor. The big camera has pixels that are nearly 10 times the size of those in the little camera, and that impacts on the image quality hugely, especially at high sensitivities!

These pictures show the difference in image quality well enough, but there's another consideration - simply, the DSLR is fast enough to cover sports action, the bridge camera isn't.