I am very pleased with the quality of the videos produced by my Panasonic TS1. But as a still camera, it sucks. It’s a typical point and shoot, with 12 megapixels crammed onto a tiny sensor, thus producing images with little detail and a load of noise. And forget trying to make it track a moving target. So it was really sensible of me to wade into the Gulf of Thailand this afternoon and try and take some still shots of surfing.
First of all, it was rough. Last night we had one of the wildest storms I can remember, with winds gusting to 50 knots. Today it was more than 20 knots even on the beach and nobody had a small enough sail to go windsurfing. The result of all this was big waves, with huge amounts of water heading for the beach and me and my little camera failing to stay upright on a regular basis.
But at least it meant there were some decent waves for SUP surfing and I captured a few videos before trying to snap some still photos. One did a reasonable job at capturing the rather gnarly conditions, but it was not properly in focus and the colours looked horrible. So I converted it to grayscale and suddenly it looked OK. If only life were like that.
