Metering
Despite having both centreweighted and spot metering, the LX5 will probably spend most of its time set to its evaluative metering mode. This is no bad thing as I found the evaluative metering produced good exposures in all but a very few situations. In fact, I only had to use centreweighted or spot metering when there was an extreme highlight in the image that was completely burning out.
For most subjects a slight tweak of the exposure compensation by 0.3-1EV was all the adjustment needed to give the exposure I required. This is easily done by pressing the dial on the rear of the camera, then turning the dial either left or right to increase of decrease the metered exposure. Very bright skies do tend to be a little burnt out in some scenes, requiring a slight adjustment to underexposed images, and conversely, images taken in very overcast conditions are quite dark and need slight overexposure. However, on the whole, in various different lighting conditions both inside and out, the LX5 produces well-exposed images.
Image: With an f/2 lens, the LX5’s macro mode has a nice shallow depth of field, but is still able to capture a great deal of detail
Like other models in the Lumix range, the LX5 features an Intelligent Auto (iAuto) mode that detects what is being photographed and changes the scene mode and exposure settings accordingly. For example, when photographing a flower, the LX5 detects that the focus point is very close and switches to macro mode. In this mode the aperture is opened to create quite a shallow depth of field.
Similarly, iAuto mode can detect whether you are trying to take a landscape or portrait and switch the scene modes appropriately. I found that the iAuto mode picked a suitable scene mode on all but one occasion, where it thought a circular flower bed was a face. Even so, the exposure was still almost perfect. So, with a variety of manual and automated exposure and metering modes, the LX5 can be as simple or as complex as you wish to make it.
