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They're everywhere, and are often just normal TVs rotated 90 degrees In shopping malls Some are pretty big Some are pretty tall too, presumably for narrower spaces Outdoors Bus stops In shop windows etc.

I’ve been thinking about camera needs lately, and I feel like, at the most basic level, everything can be broken down into three main cameras. First is the do-it-all, high-spec work camera. This is the one you use when clients ask for serious specs like 4K/120p or even 8K, or when you just want the best possible image quality. Cameras like the EOS R5 II, Nikon Z8, Sony a1, or Panasonic S1R II fit here. They’re expensive, but they can handle almost anything. Second is what I’d call an “art camera.” This is for personal use, travel, street photography, and just having fun. Ergonomics, size, and character matter more here, but it still needs to shoot good 4K video and work well in low light. Think Fuji X-Pro3, X100 VI, Sigma fp or fp-L, or even the Sony RX1R if video isn’t important. These are the cameras you actually want to carry around. Third is the high-end smartphone camera. Like it or not, this one is essential now and fills a lot of gaps. Of course, three cameras don’t really cover everything for professional work, and budget changes things a lot. You can get very capable work cameras for well under $3k, like the Fuji X-H2S. And if I added a fourth “serious” category, it would be medium format, like the Fuji GFX line or Hasselblad. But in reality… things get out of control fast. I somehow end up with way more “categories,” like high-spec all-rounders, art cameras, retro digicams, CCD cameras, Foveon cameras, IR-modded cameras, impulse buys, cameras I bought twice, cameras bought to flip, broken cameras I’m fixing, run-and-gun small sensor bodies, weird stuff like Mavicas with CD drives, and compact CCD cameras with flash for that Polaroid look. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. What camera “category” am I missing?

I’d prefer the OM-1 for stills and the S9 for video but the OM-1 is a vastly better built bit of kit.

Bring back the 80’s, the single best decade to have lived, even though those of us who lived through it (age 9-19 for me) did not realise or appreciate it at the time. I think we reached peak civilisation around Friday October 3rd 1986. I’ll take the 70’s (rose-tinted nostalgia maybe) next followed by the 90’s (weren’t so bad) and then if I had to, 2000-2010, but since then, it’s been part living, part existing, part having to work out how the fuck to constantly adapt, but more recently, working on how to exit from it all. Not in a terminal way, - just get out of the system and all it’s BS as much as possible! I don’t hate on the World. I just can’t be bothered with it…

It's hard to say which one is better - they are both excellent but behave differently. I think the OM1 is better at working out what you a doing e.g. are you panning (when it lets the stabilization 'flow') or stationary (when it tries to hold it static). The amount of crop the OM1 adds in e-stabilization is less than the S9 adds in 'high' e-stabilization mode, but the probably S9 degrades the image less in that situation. Really, the big difference between the two cameras (ignoring the lack of EVF and mechanical shutter plus the limited physical controls on the S9) is that the OM1 is maybe 80% stills and 20% video orientated, where the S9 is more like 60% video and 40% stills. The OM1 is very well built, feels great in the hand, is fully weather-sealed etc. but you'll curse it's video limitations at some point. For example, to get the sharpest video you need to use 10-bit mode, but that is *only* available as 4:2:0 HEVC in either HLG or OMLog400, and you can't adjust anything in those modes. The 8-bit modes are basically the same as the E-M1 iii, but the output looks a bit cleaner. There is no way to save custom sets of video settings - the custom sets only work for stills, but at least most settings are kept separate between stills and video modes, including button and control wheel customizations.

He is to me. Also, welcome on your increasing visits to hermit-town. It's nice here.

It’s a great combo 👍

Seeing this a lot in the wedding industry; a few shaky clips of Super 8 digitised and people go nuts for it. Same as for a handful of blurred OOF images. I have couples asking for it but there are lines I won’t cross for the sake of my artistic soul. Unless they want to pay me a lot more money and then the devil can have it…but sadly they won’t pony up for that so go elsewhere. People have ever-increasingly short attention spans and values. For instance, just 2 years ago, I had 100% take up from clients offered a free book from their wedding. Only 5 acknowledged receipt, never mind thanked me for it. I was selling these books just a few years prior for €500 and after stopping that due to massively dwindling sales to the point where it was a PITA, to do so, brought them back as a relatively low cost (to me) marketing exercise. Last year, approx 95% take up of the offer (all they have to do is confirm current address which I already have and contact number in case the courier needs to contact them) and even less acknowledgement of receipt. End of this year, just 12 months later, just 4 of this years clients ‘accepted’ a free ‘€500’ professionally printed book from their wedding and not a single one acknowledged receipt, never mind any kind of gratitude. It’s a shit show; attention spans, attitudes, just basic manners and going back to ‘The Game’ (but the bigger one as in the entire industry and what you have to do to simply survive) I’m happy I’m on a countdown to get out of it because whilst it’s not exactly ‘soul-destroying’, the joy of any of it is being sucked out of it year on year. I’m not a doom & gloom kind of guy, but the whole World is a bit of a shit show and getting worse so I am actively pursuing avenues to be an increasingly lesser part of it. And I just found out, Santa Claus is not a real person!

I currently own an E-M1 iii and OM-1 (mk1). I'd just get a used OM-1 and the 12-40mm F2.8. It's just a great combo for handheld video. If you want even better stabilization, use the 12-100mm F4 instead as that supports Sync-IS (Oly/OM equivalent of Dual-IS), but it has the downside of extra size and weight. Having recently acquired a Pana S9 I still think Oly/OM has the best stabilization - it's almost uncannily good sometimes - but the S9 runs it pretty close most of the time. Main difference for me is that the S9 needs more decisions about which stabilization modes to use in a particular situation, whereas with the OM-1 + 12-40mm I usually enable sensor + e-stabilization (M-IS 1) to minimise corner-warping and set the stabilization level to +1 and let it work out the rest for itself. With the 12-100mm the Sync-IS means sensor-shift only stabilization (M-IS 2) is much more usable at the wide end and stabilization level 0 is usually enough (which is more flowing/less sticky).

I think that shows that Lumix has several bargains on the second hand market and you can pick and choose according to your needs.

I suspect that most people will have different "categories" depending on what they're doing, but I absolutely like the thinking behind this. The more we can make sense of what we do and how we do it, the more clarity we can get and the faster we can get a kit that works and then focus on using it. As I only shoot personal projects, I don't need a work camera, so my main category is my run-n-gun travel camera, the GH7, which is used exclusively hand-held. For daytime use it's the GH7 with 14-140mm zoom, which has incredible stabilisation, and the zoom lens means I can capture almost anything I can see. It also has an integrated fan, great image quality, strong codecs, etc. For night use I can use the GH7 with 12-35mm F2.8 and get great neutral images. For funky night cinema I can pair it with fast primes like the Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95 or Speedbooster with Takumar 50mm F1.4. The second camera is (of course) my phone, which I recently upgraded to the iPhone 17 Pro from the 12 Mini. The combination of Apple Log, internal Prores HQ, and the 0.5x / 1x / 2x / 4x / 8x cameras makes it incredible for travel. I'm waiting for a good vND solution to come out. Apart from the low-light, it's basically an all-in-one solution now. Some time ago smartphones replaced my waterproof camera category which was previously GoPro / Sony X3000 action cameras. I used to have a fourth "category" which was a backup camera and used for time-lapses, but now the iPhone is good enough in the unlikely event of something happening to the GH7 and I don't really shoot time-lapses anymore so I don't really need one, but I still have an "itch" for something else. Random thoughts: It could be something very retro, like something with poor video quality that was nostalgic in some way, and graded to look either digital or analog electronic or film My OG BMPCC and BMMCC and GF3 all come to mind for this. It could be something very stylised / attitude like being super fisheye or 360 or something It could be something very niche in how you'd use it, like it could be mounted on something for a unique perspective, or could be on a pole for strange perspectives.. or even something like an action camera that you wear on your wrist and take a 10s clip every 15 minutes, or pocketable camera that you record a clip with every so often. The whole point would be a tool that would make me use it differently to how I normally use / think about shooting, and therefore be a fun and creative addition.

I don't quite see it that way; if social medial platforms are viewed on a computer, the browser takes up all the display area available and fits the content using the whole window, this can be vertical or horizontal or square for that matter. Basically only when the social media is viewed on a mobile device do some apps and websites default to vertical viewing, but that's a limitation of the device basically, and the typical way people default to using it. Originally instagram photos were square, not vertical or horizontal. Some social media platforms assume that a video is shot vertically on a mobile phone, and for a time it wasn't even possible to shoot in horizontal oritentation and have the social media site or app display it correctly; it would always force it to the vertical format. This, however, is incompatible with the way most news media sites present videos, which are horizontal only, mimicking TV. When these news media sites then displayed social media videos or cell phone videos, they would not be able to technically display the video as a vertical, instead they generated blurred sides to the video to turn the vertical video into horizontal. This is all a bunch of nonsense really. Vertical videos make it difficult to show the context and environment in which something is happening. This is why cinema and TV are in landscape orientation: it's better for displaying the content. Photos have been always shot both vertically and horizontally (probably most still horizontally, for the same reason as video), as the continuity can be broken in stills and one can simply flip the camera quickly to vertical and shoot some (portrait) shots that way and return to the landscape orientation to show context; in video, one can not do such flipping without causing problems to the viewer. Books and magazines naturally lend to images in portrait orientation or in some cases, square; for displaying a landscape image in large size one would need to use a double page spread, which of course is commonly done, but it does create some issues if an important part of the image is in the mid section. What's more the verticals in (still) photography were traditionally not anything remotely like 9:16 but 4:5, 3:4, and 2:3. I think seriously social media apps and sites should consider making the vertical format something like 4:5 rather than 9:16 as the latter is just not very good. It's too narrow. Device fitting inside a pocket in an extreme limitation. Clearly, if the main reason vertical videos are requested by advertising clients is people looking at their mobile phones in tube or bus, or wherever, the quality loss from cropping from 16:9 is hardly going to be visible on those tiny displays. Sure, the angle of view is narrrower but it's always going to look awkward having such an extreme aspect ratio in a vertical image. Interesting to hear that there are now high-resolution displays which show video content in public. I can't remember for sure seeing such things myself, though it's possible that I have seen it but didn't pay attention to it. I would be very surprised if those displays are as elongated as 9:16 though. It just doesn't make any visual sense to use such an extreme aspect ratio for vertical content when there is a choice to stick to 4:5 or 2:3. And when those much more suitable aspect ratios are used for the vertical content, the cropping from landscape 16:9 is less extreme and easier to manage.

When using 16:9 to create vertical videos, the loss of resolution is less of the issue (at least for me) and more the POV, especially as it pertains to action. You lose so much information cropping a 16:9 video into a 9:16 timeline. Open gate allows you to crop off less from the left and right, giving you more perspective. Here is an example, though it's not exactly a perfect one, since one shot is made from a cropped 16:9 frame and the other is from a cell phone that was filming in 9:16, since we were doing quick on site turnaround working with the college that hired us' social media team, but you'd get the same effect using open gate like we usually do. (Sorry this was just the easiest/most recent example I could make.) This is made from a 16:9 frame. Notice how the celebrating wrestler takes up the entire frame, so you can't see many of the attendees? Here is a shot straight from the vertical video. You'd get the same view if you were cropping an open gate image. The second image is preferable, especially when it comes to marketing ourselves to other colleges who might be interested in hiring us, as they can better see the reaction everything is getting from the students in attendance. Plus, it just offers a broader image that better illustrates the vibe and excitement of the audience.

Something interesting I’ve found, my most common deliverables are actually 2:35:1 and 9:16. If you want to deliver both horizontal and vertical and frame for 2:35:1, you end up with some solid headroom for vertical stuff. Decent alternative to open gate IF you are making 2:35:1 content. I get that 2:35:1 is def a personal preference and there’s a lot of work that has to be 16:9, but I’ve found that can work well. I get it though. Open gate is useful.

I think the goal is to record once and have a frame that can be cropped to work with both landscape and portrait edits.

It's a bit of a vanilla option when you can get a used S1 for same price which is same spec but a much more premium body, or pay a bit more and get an S9 with PDAF

An increasing trend in marketing today, is not necessarily being the best or the most reliable or the most anything except being the most popular. The cult of ‘vote for me’ is taking over. The ‘game’ is knowing that but whether any of us choose to play, is up to us, but without question, we are missing out on a share of the pie if we don’t make an attempt to at least sit at the table. This more a situation for the small to medium sized business. Larger corps operate under different rules and for the private individual, it is irrelevant if you use social media or not. Social Media, visually anyway, is vertical. Personally, I despise social media whether it be Facebook or Twitter or TikTok or Whatever, but if as a small business operator, I actively chose to not participate, it would be completely fair for anyone to point their finger at me and state, “your business skills are lacking”. Current status = working on it. Can we get back to talking about cameras again now?