This is a shot of my grandson doing what I did and probably any youth has done at his age, “walk the line”. Growing up I lived very close to railroad tracks. The “gang” and I would spend endless hours walking what we thought was miles on railroad tracks. Shades of “Stand by Me”, a great movie. Unfortunately we never found a body. Or rather fortunately we never found a body.
About the most exciting thing that ever happened was a flasher jumping out wiggling his wiggler. The two gals I was with, Val and Donna noticed him before I did. Their fits of laughter alerted me to this pathetic guy. Naturally we had to whip this up into a near death experience by the time we got home.
The gang was a close knit bunch of guys who all grew up together on our block. Neil, Ian, Tim, Keith, Andy, Gord and myself made up this highly trained cadre of cowboys, army grunts, super heroes, explorers and whatever else it was we were pretending to be at the time. Once we hit Grade 7, Junior High in this neck of the woods, we discovered girls. So much for the close knit buddies, it was ever man for himself.
The day I took this photograph (yes TOOK it, not MADE it) I had ready to go my Nikon D700, Leica M3 and M5 and a Panasonic LX-5. The Panasonic won out. I am totally amazed at the image quality this camera outputs. The Leica optics are razor sharp and contrasty. Dynamic range is tremendous giving me the ability to convert some images to Black and White. I’m not all that fussy about colour imagery beyond accurate colour reproduction. I am use to Kodachrome and it’s limited applications however when it comes to Black and White it better be good or it hits the for sale sites.
It’s hard to show you the detail and excellent tonal range in this image. It seems whatever algorithm WordPress uses really messes things up. In the original image you can see every single eyelash and the background which was at least 7 stops darker than the foreground has plenty of rich luminous detail.
If you are looking for a very pocketable P&S I highly recommend the Panasonic LX-5. I hear the LX-7 is even better. I got my LX-5 new for $250 just before the LX-7 came out. Frankly I was quite prepared to hate this camera. I had already burned through Nikon, Canon, and Olympus P&S’s. Image quality was dismal and most exhibited large amounts of chromatic nastiness. My wife’s Canon G11 is a decent camera but way to heavy to carry in your pocket. Check out what dpreview had to say about the LX-5 when it first was announced by clicking here.
So when I next decide to “walk the line” I will have my trusty Panasonic LX-5 in my pocket and adventure in my heart.