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Exactly the current info is a mess with half of YT saying it’s the same as a simple CST while the other half (shills) are like “omg your LUMIX s1 II is a baby Alexa and and and it’s different cuz cuz cuz arri engineers tweaked the color look look but my affiliate LUMIX sent me this camera for free”

I think it's pretty incredible that a small mirrorless camera has gotten this BUT I take nothing said about it so far seriously because the only people who seemingly have access to it are shills (and while I like watching some of them, they are still shills.) It'll definitely be interesting once real users get their hands on it and try it out, but until then its just a "oh, that could be really neat." I am, however, intrigued by the possibility of more Lumix/Arri collabs and what the future might hold if they are working together.

Equivalency of DOF is the elephant in the room for sure. In comparison, MFT lacks in the selection of gargantuan lenses with super-shallow DOF and FF lacks in small lenses without shallow DOF. If someone made a FF 28-280mm F7.0-11 lens then it should be the same size as my 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 lens, but of course the internet would go ballistic over it and run whatever manufacturer dared to create such an abomination out of town faster than you can say "grab your pitchforks - the devil has come for our children!". It depends on what you're doing of course, but for me personally when I switched from watching YT lens reviews to watching award winning movies and TV shows from the worlds leading professionals I had the Ah-ha moment when I realised very few shots had shallower DOF than could be achieved with relatively normal MFT lenses. Even when looking at the shots that would have required quite fast lenses on MFT, the aesthetic penalty for the DOF being deeper was very low. I then looked at what potential benefits would be traded-away for it.... lighter cameras that make me more likely to carry them around and use them and therefore get more shots to use in the edit... smaller equipment making me more pleasant to be around and having a nicer trip and causing the people around me to be happier and more relaxed and look nicer in frame... the smaller rig making the people around me less distracted and suspicious... the deeper DOF meaning there was less chance of having one person in focus but the others out of focus or it simply missing focus by focusing on the wrong thing... the much lower likelihood of having a difficult conversation with law enforcement or self-important security staff, etc. I concluded that getting slightly shallower DOF was a very small benefit competing against a significant number of advantages that would make far more impact to the end product and to my experience in using it. The extra cropping potential is one of the only benefits I can see for sensors above 2.5K. I put the cropping modes on my GH5 and GX85 into good use when I was shooting on primes and have been hugely impressed with them with my GH7 + 9mm F1.7 PanaLeica which I'll use for shooting in ultra-low-light. The R5 + EF-RF + 40mm F2.8 would be a great medium size setup. Perhaps the best second camera FF setup I could think of would be your R5 + 24-105mm F4. Like I mentioned above, the flexibility and speed of using a zoom when shooting in uncontrolled conditions just gives you more coverage - there's a reason doco and ENG shooters use zooms! Yeah, that's a real gem, I'm still seeing footage crop up on YT that really shows how much you can push things. I've also noticed it's very popular with the vlogging crowd and it seems to give really good results, similar to those who might use a small mirrorless, which is definitely saying something when you consider the size of it. Nah. Do a complete end-to-end analysis of what gives you the best results in the final edit or final photos, work out what equipment aligns best with those trade-offs, buy it, test it and learn the settings, then shift focus to actually shooting and don't look back. Beauty magazines make you feel ugly, and camera YT makes you regret your equipment. Best strategy is to ignore both. By far the most important skill in uncontrolled environments is being able to understand and predict the behaviour of your subjects. Not only does this matter for shooting people in public, but it matters doubly (triply?) for safari because the biggest struggle seems to be even finding the animals in the first place. A professional animal tracker would probably get better footage with an iPhone than an amateur with all the equipment in the world who spent a week and only saw a few animals the whole time. Perhaps a good exercise is to think about what the total cost will be of the trip, think about how much it would matter if you didn't see any animals at all, and then see how much it would cost to hire a guide or some other service that would help you locate things. There's a reason that people hire a model instead of just walking the streets hoping to find someone to shoot!

Truth. Though by the time you make an MFT lens with equivalent DOF to a FF lens with the same FOV, it ends up around the same size. It's one of the reasons the Canon 800/11 is (relatively) small, as are mirror lenses. Not that DOF matters much for wildlife in the distance. I'll also keep in mind that I can get away with fewer lenses because 100 megapixels is a lot and because I can vary between 4k and 5.8k that are 44mm wide and 8k that's 36mm wide - that's a lot of focal lengths for each lens, assuming that the lenses resolve well. The relatively tiny Fuji GF 50/3.5 is kind of amazing for that reason. Of course, there are plenty of tiny FF lenses too - the Summicron-M's are small and something like the Canon 40/2.8 is fantastic. I could just bring my R5 with that, I suppose. Or I could just bring the Osmo Pocket 3 and call it good. Some of my favorite photos from Peru were taken with it! It's also really easy to keep handy in a pocket or I could probably hang it from a little carabiner on a belt loop or something like that. You're gonna make me regret selling all of my MFT gear a few years ago. 😢 (I regretted it almost immediately, though I can make myself feel a bit better when I realize I wouldn't be using it most of the time) I haven't looked much into that - I know that late September is a considered a good time to go, partly because it's before a lot of the rains come in and I'm told that it's easier to find animals near watering holes. I have no illusion that anything I do will be an award-winning photo, in any case. Heat waves or no, I'm sure the photos will make me happy as long as I can make out the animals.

Yes, AI is a real wildcard. I see that there are really three fundamentally different groups when it comes to generative content. The first is professionals who create material for the general public, or various niches of the public. This is where AI will have incredible impacts. The second is professionals who create for their clients directly. This is people like wedding photographers etc, where the client is the audience. This has been debated, but I think that there will still be a market here. If I did something and wanted a record of it, I would want the final images to be of me, not AI generated content that looks like the people I know might have looked during the thing that actually happened. The third is people creating for themselves, where there is no client or money changing hands. This is every amateur, every personal project from professionals, etc. The goal is to have a final result that this person created. Amateur photographers take photos and print and hang the best ones, not because they're the best photos ever taken, but because they were taken themselves. Personally, I'm in the last category and I am completely resigned to the fact that my videos will never be great, will never attract a significant audience, will never be regarded as important, etc, but that's not why I do it so in that sense AI is no threat to me at all. I do understand that people are all in different segments of the industry and have very different perspectives for very good reasons..

A phone is always a great second camera in a pinch.. but if there's budget, it's hard to look past the GX85 or LX10. They're comparatively small, especially if you fit the GX85 with one of the pancake zoom lenses. Jeez, it's lenses the whole way isn't it. A sensor size goes up, lens size goes up exponentially... Maybe you should rent an MFT system? I understand that lots of the wildlife is best seen at dawn? Things can be pretty still then, so that works in your favour. Not sure how things go at dusk as the sun shouldn't have been heating things directly for a while and temps could even out a bit. But if you're shooting big cats sitting lazily in trees during the middle of the day it'll be heat shimmer galore. Yeah, these old lenses can be a bit beat-up sometimes. The GH5 does a great job with stabilisation, but there's no getting around the fact that you're trying to hand-hold an 800mm FOV lens, or trying to use it on a crappy tripod where the only thing "fluid" about the head on it is the words in the product description!

Wonderful images... great stuff!

This is my most recent finished edit. I wrote the music for this too. I've shared it before, but some might not have seen it. Shot on the trip I did to Seoul last August where the wife and I got sick and spent most of our time in the hotel. OG BMMCC + 12-35mm F2.8 + TTartisans 50mm F1.2. Graded in Resolve with heavy use of the Film Look Creator tool. Music written in Logic Pro.

This looks incredible! Great images and colour, and I really like the music and edit too. It really is a different world down there isn't it...

I wholeheartedly agree with where this sentiment is coming from - but I think the pressing/prudent thing to spend that leave on is wrapping our heads around generative AI (etc) and how that tech will likely transform/disrupt our current creative media workflows and the creative media economy.

If I remember correctly Arri created LogC4 to accomodate the increased dynamic range over previous cameras and avoid encoding issues. I guess that since no other camera on the market (mirrorless or otherwise) is able to reach the same numbers it wouldn't make much sense to use LogC4 especially considering LogC3 has been around for a lot longer and there's a huge ecosystem of grading tools and LUTS made for it out there.

ive asked this before, but why not logC4/AWG4?

Wait, so it won't turn the Panasonic into an actual Arri? Or be all that useful in any real way except for people who want to use a Panasonic as a B cam to their Arri and fairly easily match them in the grade?

Someone hit a nerve with poor little Cammy. 🤣

I’ve heard some people (mainly the YouTube shills) say it’s the next best thing since slice bread. Others have said it’s no better than the Davinci Resolce Arri Log CST lol

This was introduced last week and offers a raft of new features but the one that seems to be catching everyone's eye is the (paid for) ARRI LogC3 option. https://www.panasonic.com/uk/corporate/news/articles/panasonic-introduces-extensive-new-firmware-updates-for-its-lumix-s-series-cameras-s1rii-s1ii-and-s1iie.html Surprised there hasn't been a discussion about this already on here. I'm guessing that could be that no one has yet bought those camera types or is too busy wondering why they are spending so much effort looking after a cat that isn't their cat but has just turned up and convinced itself that it is now indeed their cat to be discussing camera firmware updates. Or, in my case, both. A bit of a caveat is that it doesn't work in RAW...

Speaking of new cameras... This was shot by a friend of mine on a "vintage" Lumix LX10 in Nauticam housing and different wet diopters.

We are two divers, one GH5MII in a Nauticam Housing and a GH5S in Aquatica housing.

Hey Everyone, To kick off July, I have a couple of fun tracks ready on my City/Urban 3 page: "SMALL TIME CROOKS" (LoFi) "THE CLASSIC PRIVATE EYE" (LoFi) https://soundimage.org/city-urban-3/ As always, they're 100% free to use in your projects with attribution, just like my thousands of other music tracks and sounds. Attribution information is here: https://soundimage.org/attribution-info/ Enjoy, stay safe and keep being creative! 🙂

A second camera with a wider angle lens (or zoom) isn't a bad idea. I'm afraid a second GF body is probably not going to be in the budget for me, but a second small camera or film camera isn't out of the question! I'll hope that the elephant doesn't ram us too much, though - we're likely to rent a truck with a rooftop tent or some other form of camper or van. It would stink to have our home get crushed. I may also bring my older Canon EF 100-400 - but carry-on space is limited! Definitely true about heat waves getting to be a problem eventually - and while they weren't a big deal here yesterday near sundown at about 24C, they're likely to be more of a thing in Namibia in September at 34C. That is definitely true. I have an old Telyt-R 560mm ... maybe an f/5.6(?) around here somewhere (got it at a garage sale, of all things). The biggest problem that I have with it, and by extension other vintage extreme telephotos, is that aside from the lens IS, things seem to have loosened up a bit and every time there's a slight breeze or I even look at it, it vibrates for about 20 seconds. Might be better on the GH5?

That's a hell of a lens! I have a Tokina 400mm F5.6 permanently on my GH5 now to act as a telescope because I looked into buying one and it was cheaper and more fun to buy a super-telephoto lens! It's not super-sharp wide open but in daylight you can just stop down, plus anything that is quite far away suffers from heat haze anyway, so the sharpness of the air is the limiting factor. I've thought about going on safari for years but have never actually gone. My thinking eventually lead me to the idea of having two bodies, one with a very long lens on it, and the other one with a very shot zoom on it so you can get shots of when the monkeys start stealing food out of your van, or the elephants ram you. My impression from social media is that these things are practically guaranteed to happen. I have the PanaLeica 100-400mm on my "when I'm a millionaire" list as it seems it would be perfect for things like a safari where you never know how far away the subjects are going to be.

Ouch!! My GH7 (with battery, card, 14-140mm, and vND) is just over 1.1kg. The 12-100mm is just a hair under 300g heavier, so the GH7 + 12-100mm combo would actually be a hair above 1.4kg by the time it's fully functional, and my setup doesn't even include any audio equipment, so that's also something to take into consideration. I walked around Pompeii carrying the GH5 + Voigtlander 17.5mm + Rode Videomic Pro (1.4kg) in my hand for several hours, raising it up when I saw something I wanted to shoot. My wrist was sore for several days afterwards, just from having the weight on it for that long. It might be something you'd get used to, but having to train so you have the strength and stamina to carry a camera around seems a bit much to me! I agree. The high-ISO performance is actually quite impressive too. For low-light I have the 9mm F1.7 with CrZ and if I want longer range than that I have the 12-35mm F2.8. Probably the only other lens I would get for super-low-light shooting is the PanaLeica 15mm F1.7 because it's small and fast and being a Leica lens should be nice and sharp wide-open so the CrZ mode should be quite usable with it.

I own and use both. The Oly 12-100mm F4 is a great lens, but it's much bigger and heavier than the Pana 14-140mm (560g versus 265g) - both on an OM-1: On an E-M1 ii/iii or OM-1 the 12-100mm supports Sync-IS which gives sublime video IS performance, but even with the relatively light (for that kind of camera) OM-1, the combo is 1.2 kg and somewhat front-heavy if you're using it handheld. A GH7 + 12-100mm would be nearly 1.4 kg. As a 'travel' lens, IMHO the combination of low weight and focal length range makes the 14-140mm almost perfect (other than in really low light, of course).

But, imo, you/me/we are only capable of looking at this from our particular idea of art and what it means for art to have a soul. The next couple generations of kids will have different reference points for that same idea/measurement. This is why the big corps pushing AI don't care how we feel about it - bcuz they're looking at the long game. So they understand that we are not their target audience (bcuz we'll be dead, lol). Their target audiences are the generations coming up who will be born into a world where AI, etc is just the norm. So you're absolutely right that there will still be people who value art that has a soul - but again, what will prob be different is the criteria they use to decide what art with a soul looks/feels like. It will be different - but just as essential to their existence as it has always been throughout human history. There is no technological advancement that will ever result in humans losing their desire to make/consume art with soul. What can and is happening is that we are losing our ability to monetize/exploit/make a living off art with soul on a large commercial scale. But that really only matters bcuz we currently live/work/exist within a capitalist system that is exploitative by design.