Dangling in the air, sat inside a cable cart crossing the river Thames. It’s windy and the cabin is rocking from side to side. I’m usually okay with heights, apart from the weird faces I pull whilst sitting in a plane that’s taking off.

On this occasion, as the cart rocks from side-to-side on a single cable, I’m left reminded of this facial expression and do my best to conceal it. Luckily the people sat opposite are on a FaceTime call (public video calls in London are a thing now, apparently). In my hand is a PANASONIC LUMIX GH5, a present I got for myself at Christmas and typically a few weeks before the updated GH5S was announced. I bought it for video like most others, but this time I’m using it for stills like a normal DSLR. Novel, eh?

I’ve been out with it all day, and I’m really enjoying it as a stills camera. True, a larger APS-C sensor might be better, but I’m not sure I’d pay more for that. The Leica lens it comes with is holding up just fine though. Images are sharp enough.

It’s mirrorless, so the viewfinder takes some getting used to, but with the right settings, having a live preview of the image that takes into account your ISO, shutter and aperture settings is useful, if not lazy. But lazy is okay with me.

The images in this post are all edited. This post isn’t a review of any kind, more me sharing my thoughts on how I’m enjoying this camera for its’ secondary use. So, I didn’t really see the need to post images straight from the camera.

The day was overcast, and the camera could clearly do with some extra light. Whilst it copes well in lower light, I really wanted to get the shutter speed on this a little faster.

The trip to London was a nice first outing with this camera and gave me some good indications of its’ capabilities.

Two big lessons so far. Burst mode is awesome. The location of the ‘display’ button on the hand grip is a terrible design error. I was reminded of both as I sat in the swaying cable car in Greenwich, taking a ton of burst images in seconds whilst simultaneously changing the display view on the 3″ screen.

For more photos, check out my Instagram page.

If you want to buy the GH5, you can get it from Amazon UK and Amazon US.

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