I filmed this autumn montage in the woodlands along Percy Beck, near Barnard Castle, not long after buying my first Panasonic AF101 to replace my old Sony Z5. The trees were at their best, gold shifting into deep rust, and it felt like the right subject to properly get to know a camera that worked completely differently to anything I’d used before.

A Different Kind of Camera

The AF101 uses a Micro Four Thirds sensor, a real step up from the Z5’s much smaller 1/3-inch sensor, and for the first time I had a body that took interchangeable lenses rather than a fixed zoom. That sounds like a simple upgrade on paper, but it changed how I actually worked. The Z5 let me point, zoom and shoot without thinking too hard about it. The AF101 asked for manual focus and gave me shallow depth of field I’d never had to control before, and for the Percy Beck shoot I was learning both at once, swapping between a couple of primes and a zoom to see what actually worked for picking out the autumn colour and texture in the trees.

Feature	Panasonic AF101	Sony Z5
Sensor	Micro Four Thirds (17.3 × 13mm)	1/3-inch 3CMOS (ClearVid Exmor)
Interchangeable lenses	Yes (Micro Four Thirds mount)	No (fixed zoom)
Depth of field	Shallow, cinematic	Deeper, more video-like
Low light	Better sensitivity, less noise	More noise in low light
Recording	AVCHD, 1080/50i, 25p, 720p	HDV (tape), 1080/50i
Media	SD/SDHC/SDXC cards	MiniDV tapes

What the Woodland Taught Me

I kept the shots themselves simple: gentle pans, lingering frames of leaves catching low sun, wider shots taking in the full spread of colour. Even in those simple movements, the AF101 held onto textures and tonal detail the Z5 never quite managed. The footage is set to a track by my friend David Cox, a musician based in York, whose atmospheric sound fitted the woodland well.

The bigger change was in how I approached a shoot afterwards. With the Z5, I relied on the fixed zoom and just pointed the camera where I needed it. The AF101 asked me to think about lens choice and where the light was falling before I started, and manual focus meant I couldn’t just trust autofocus to catch what mattered. It took longer to get comfortable with, but the pictures it gave back were worth the extra care.

Teesdale gave me plenty to practise on. Living here means the changing seasons, the woodland paths and the way light moves across the hills and the beck are all close at hand, and Percy Beck in autumn was as good a place as any to start learning a camera that was going to change how I worked for years afterwards.

If you’d like to see more of my landscape work, you can explore my Landscape & Environment work.