Recently in late night impulse I acquired a Japanese only Panasonic GF2. My Lumix GF1 remains my favourite walkabout and holiday camera due to its ‘just right’ size and pleasing images coupled with its excellent 20mm lens – but I thought I’d get a GF2 to back it up. Internally, sensor wise, not a lot has changed. It has a few less physical controls and a touch screen – but shooting in aperture priority a lot of the time, not much changes. Japanese language is not much of a hurdle – most menu options have imagery also, and one can always use translate on phone if needed.

Anyway… once it arrived and I coupled it with my 14-42mm Zoom (28-84 full frame), we took a stroll into Auckland’s CBD to see what was going on.

One thing going on was practice for the Manu World Champs in the relatively new inner city sea swimming area. A great addition for inner city folk, it offers a fenced off, life guard patrolled place to swim. In our heavily populated ‘city of sails’ direct swimming in the ocean within the CBD has been limited over the years due to safety. The new setup is nice. Manu world champs? – for those out of New Zealand, this might be renamed ‘Dive Bomb World Champs’ – Manu’s Maori translation is often Bird or Kite – but we also in recent decades referred to a bomb as a Manu also. I remember kids Tombstoning as a kid too – but I think that was more dodgy bombing off rocks and into iffy water holes (the name hinting at the danger).

Quite the art to Manu’s – watching for a while, there was no correlation to the size of the person and the size of the splash. Some pretty small fella’s were making much bigger splashes than the real big fella’s. It’s also not just splash – like all sports, there is a raft of different sections and bomb types to be judged on. People were having a splash regardless!

Circling back to the car, we wandered through some of the new apartment areas and past the tram on its circuits. Ive never lived inner city. Some elements of my lifestyle would fit in fine, but not others. Things like the above swimming area must really help when you are in close proximity to others and have no land/garden space. On that, we also past the community gardens – little plots each allocated to their own gardeners to get the green fingers growing.

Then it was back to the car and away from the CBD off home. The Panasonic GF2 performed well. Like the GF1, nice and compact so no neck breaking. Not too hard to see in direct sunlight – though I mostly use rear screens for centre focus and recompose rather than looking at detail. I’d love to get a 14mm for it, but the cost more than the camera, so I might just have to keep my eyes out for a bargain one day.

Today’s images were shot in RAW and edited in darktable using a Portra 160 LUT as a base.