Leaderboard

Having bought the Sigma for my S9 (largely because of your enthusiasm for it 🙂) I have to 100% agree - it's a perfect companion to the S9 in size and weight, with nice smooth zoom and focus rings. As I normally shoot video in 4k50p which forces an APS-C crop anyway, it being an APS-C lens is actually a plus for me as it forces APS-C for everything so I don't have to deal with changes in viewing angle between stills and video. The 12MP APS-C stills are OK for my purposes, and I have the compact FF 18-40 f4.5-6.3 if I really feel the need for 24MP stills. So I tend to regard my S9 as an APS-C camera with a bonus FF stills mode 🙂. The adaptor is only doing what it's supposed to do with an APS-C lens on the front, same as using a native L-mount APS-C lens (e.g. the Sigma 18-50 f2.8).

Sirui first light.... I'm not 100% sure I've done everything correctly, so take these with a pinch of salt. Also, the Sirui has a vND on it but the normal shots don't, so that might account for the WB and polarisation differences. The advice I heard was to set the taking lens to infinity and then focus with the adapter (single focus setup) but the AF on the taking lens seems to work just fine and Uncle ChatGPT says that setting the taking lens to infinity is more likely to be an optimal setting rather than the only setting that will work. Here's a shot where I set the adapter to minimum focus and then focused closer with the taking lens.. I don't think it's properly focused though, and the bokeh isn't squished much at all, so this is probably quite far from optimal settings, but also possible. Obviously I have a lot of testing to do, but if I can still use the AF to fine-tune the focus then that's even better as I can sort-of zone-focus with the adapter and then shoot quickly with AF like I normally do! Overall though, a very promising start.. despite it being so big and heavy!!

99% of the people on YouTube cannot be called 'creators' unless the word is applied after the word 'content' and that followed with, 'for the sake of' and more often than not, proceeded by the word 'banal'. An endless stream of copycats with very little originality. It does exist (originality) but there isn't very much.

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..