London Marathon 2009

Got up early today to go on an assignment and take pictures of the 2009 Flora London Marathon. It was an event by the LPMG and Bliss to take pictures of the official bliss runners. Although they announced rain for today, the weather has been fantastic and great for being out and taking pictures although the harsh light posed a problem at times.

I decided to take the Panasonic LC1 with me since it has a very usefull zoom, fast lens, handles very well and the dynamic range is very good. Everyone else had big dSLRs with long zoom lenses so my 90mm tele was where their zoom lenses started. My choice of cameras did stick out but at least I did not have to worry about a sore neck at the end of the day ;).
The only problem with my choice of camera is the slow and unreliable AF and the EVF lag of the LC1, I had to resort to manual focus at times and using one eye to frame through the EVF and the other to see the actual scene, this worked ok although the EVF is not 1:1. It is really a shame Panasonic never released a LC2 based on a 4/3 sensor and faster AF, a G1 in a LC1 body would be a fantastic camera and a bit like a digital Contax G2. I think the most important thing in a new camera for me is a fast and reliable AF, using manual focus is ok but I would not want to rely on it all the time.

Since I never go out of the house without one of my GRDs, I also had the GRD I with me for street shots while walking around. It did give me some very nice shots but also a few problems that I need to look into.

You can see more pictures from the marathon in my Dropbox gallery here.