The Queen is dead. Long live the King.

As some of you know from Facebook mentions, during the last run down to Space Center, I discovered that my favorite walking-around camera, my little Panasonic GF1, wasn’t working. So I took a deep breath and bundled her up (I dunno, some of my cameras are hims and some are hers, and I don’t know what the difference is, but the PanaLeica* is definitely a her) and sent her off to the Panasonic Factory Service shop.

It was too late. Apparently when you sweat as much as I do in the Texas summer, with a camera hanging off your neck, some of the salt gets into the camera and corrodes the internals. So she’s gone to an honorable “remember when?” spot on the shelf above my desk with other bits of personal history – things I’ve run across and can’t bear to part with. When I die someone’s going to wonder “what did he save all this stuff for?” and junk the lot… but until then they’re memories and they stay.

Thing is, I’ve gotten VERY used to having a small inconspicuous close-work camera and my Canons, wonderful tools that they are, are noticeable from half-a-mile away. So the loss of the PanaLeica leaves a noteworthy gap in my working bag.

Enter the GX-7 – the latest update in Panasonic’s scaled-down Micro 4/3 line. It’s essentially a GF1 with several years’ worth of development and refinement. And as a friend/inspiration source dude comments, it’s not nearly as pretty as the GF1 but with the new features and changes, it’s worth it. The friends at The World’s Biggest Camera Store were able to hook me up without leaving the rent unpaid…

Yesterday about 4:00 a new UPS guy swooped across the porch and dropped off a box. (The old guy was a shooter himself, and would usually stick for a few seconds to see what was in the box with the interesting return address…. This one’s not nearly so much fun.)

It took a few minutes of figuring out where the controls went and what some of the new settings do, and an hour or so to spruce up the charge on the battery, and then I tucked the new kid into the camera seat and went out to work. After the pay gig, on the way out, there was a quick stop for this:

The new kid and I are going to be friends. (Yup, this is a “him.”)

*When Panasonic decided to get into the digital camera field, they realized fairly quickly that they had some of the finest electronics engineers known to man, but they didn’t know much about building cameras or lenses. So they turned to the finest camera and lens designers known to man, the guys at Leica. And at about that time Leica had realized they needed to get into digital cameras (thousands of fans banging on the door screaming “Go Digital, Dammit!” will do that for you…) so they were agreeable to several kinds of collaboration – and the results of that were magnificent digital Leicas for the nobility and pretty damn superb digital Panasonics for the peasantry. Digital Leicas carry Leica-based price tags… worth it if you’ve got it but unreachable if you don’t. Digital Panasonics lack the famous Leica Red Dot, but they make first-rate images and they’re priced for peasants. So, since I am at heart and in wallet a peasant …

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