It’s quite late in the evening and we’re huddled inside a shepherd’s hut at a height of 3500m in Himalayas. My guide’s parents were temporarily camping out in the meadow to graze a flock of 500-odd sheep. This was their hut. The old man, my guide’s father, is 75 yet phenomenally active for his age. He has collected wild curry leaves from the meadow and that would be part of our dinner. Inside the hut, there is little light except for the flicker of the flame upon which our dinner will be cooked. Cows are tied behind in one corner and this man positions himself near the stone hut’s entrance to catch some light from the fading evening to clean and cut the leaves. As a photographer, I think this is a perfect environmental shot accurately portraying all that was going on in the shepherd hut that evening. But it’s also quite late, there’s hardly any light for me to make a perfect image. But I try! I bump up the ISO to 20000 and set the shutter speed at 1/20 at the risk of underexposing the shot with the hope that I could pull out the details in post processing. And here’s the result below - quite impressed with the tack sharp and natural quality of this image taken at extreme low light inside a dark shepherd’s hut.

In June this year, I spent few weeks in Uttarakhand testing a brand new mirrorless camera. Panasonic is the latest entrant into full frame mirrorless market. They sure took their time before jumping into the fray but they’ve come up with a solid product. Launched as the new Lumix S Series, two flagship full frame mirrorless cameras were announced last year, up for sale this year. LUMIX S1R and S1 are the two cameras, both with a 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor and an exciting L-Mount standard.(We’ll get to why this is exciting in a bit). The S1R is the top of the line camera with a 47.3-megapixel sensor while the S1 sports a 24.2-megapixel sensor. I carried the Lumix S1 paired with a Panasonic S 24-105mm f/4 lens with me.

Now in the interests of all fairness, I must disclose I haven’t used any other mirrorless systems yet, so there will be no comparison whatsoever. This post is purely based on my experience of using Lumix S1 alone, which was my workhorse for the two weeks I spent in Uttarakhand.

Lumix S1 - The ultimate hybrid for Stills and Video. Image courtesy: Panasonic

Panasonic’s Lumix S1 is the 24.2 Megapixel camera that is meant to be an all round professional camera for both videography and photography on a slightly lower price point (S1R is more expensive and targets purely professional still photographers btw). But priced at 2500 USD (body only), S1 is definitely more expensive than similar models of competing brands. However, there are some distinct advantages the S1 brings to the table.