First up was the panorama feature, something I hadn't owned since the Fuji F550. One can do this with the camera held in either direction, and just release the shutter button when you have enough. It does lock down most settings, and that needs to be seen in a photo to be understood.
My test shot began on an indoor wall so the nx300 set focus and exposure.. including white balance. The shot swung left past our kitty and out to the porch. Duncan is a much fuzzier cat in the photo as he's inside the set focus point, and outside is fuzzy overexposed and mighty blue due to tungsten WB! These are not surprises, just part of what comes with certain features, and seeing it at its worst will help me use it better in the future.
Another feature I tested is in-camera processing. Pentax has that down to an art, but we're holding a Samsung now. I took a fine image of Duncan resting near the crackling fire with the 30mm f/2 pancake lens. I then went into playback, cropped it mostly square (via touchscreen, quite nice!) and then added vignetting to lessen the distractions and focus on flames and cat. Nice look and swiftly finished. I do need to see if I can control vignette settings though, in my haste to try it I did not look for alternatives to the preset value. Either way it worked well and looks good.
There's plenty more to learn on this camera - and relearn as well! I took an HDR image early on but now I've forgotten where that setting resides. Oopz! Found it: a dynamic range setting of course..
Learning also extends to Lightroom 4, which is a much different game from PS Elements v10. I may need a guidebook for that, looks more complex than the Sierra Nevada above timberline.. :-)
