Last night I took delivery of a brand new Panasonic LUMIX LX-3. I am really excited about this little beast of a camera. It sort of represents a whole new type of shooting that I have been really wanting to experiment with. This camera can be classified as a compact or a point-and-shoot but it is really so much more.

First of all, it has a great lens. The Leica Vario-Summicron offers a 24mm equivalent at the wide end with a maximum aperture of 2.0. This combined with the fact that this camera weighs close to nothing at all, has no mirror flipping up and down, make it possible to shoot in very low light, handheld.

There are so many other cool things about this camera that I need to stop and take a breath for a second. However, one of the main advantages is that this camera can shoot in RAW format. Unfortunately, both Apple and Adobe do not yet support it. I am sort of surprised at Panasonic/Leica for not going the DNG route on this model, but who knows what they are up to.

While I anxiously await RAW support from Apple ( and/or Adobe ) I have a few options. First of all, I can simply shoot in JPEG mode and pretend like the RAW option doesn’t even exist ( as if ). Second, I could install the supplied SilkyPix software and do my RAW conversions there. This sounds like a plan, and will probably help me out in a pinch, but I hate the idea of adding yet another application to my very tightly integrated workflow!

The third option, and the one I am going to use for the time being is to shoot in RAW+Jpeg mode, and import directly to Aperture. So far this seems to be working with a few oddities. By shooting RAW+Jpeg I get the RAW as a sort of backup for the future when Apple adds support for this camera. I can then use the Jpeg files for my typical work on the web, and if I really need to I can install SilkyPix and use that as well.

The oddities I mentioned are that when I import these RAW+Jpeg pairs, Aperture doesn’t seem to recognize them as RAW+Jpeg pairs. It simply imports them as individual files. I’m okay with this, but I fear that when Aperture adds support for this camera, I will have to re-import them, hopefully not!

The other interesting, and somewhat helpful, oddity is that in the case of the RAW files, I can see the thumbnail of the image. In fact when I click on a RAW thumbnail I can see a small version of it on screen for a second before it displays that “unsupported image format” message.

So, even though Aperture does not yet support this camera, I can still use it for a variety of purposes. I can keep track of all of my files, I can add metadata, and move things around, back things up, and maintain my workflow. I can use those Jpegs on the web, and for whatever I want, and I can concentrate on having fun with my new camera!