Leaderboard

Back from a visit to Japan. We spent most of the time in a small town but went to Tokyo for a weekend, so I shot a lot in Tokyo and used the rest of the time to test a range of lenses I took just for that purpose. I tested the 12-35mm F2.8 for Night Cinema and it worked great and I loved the images, but as it got darker I kept cranking up the ISO and in the end it just didn't have the levels for the truly dark backstreets. I also tested the tiny 35mm F1.6 c-mount CCTV lens I got off ebay some time ago. It produced some really nice images in the right scenarios, but the plane of focus was so incredibly distorted that any scene with stuff off-centre in the frame would look really strange. It had more level than the 12-35mm but still fell short of my better options. My themes for the place emerged very quickly.... vending machines, bicycles, and lanterns. Anyone who has been to Japan will be surprised by this exactly zero percent. At this point we went to Tokyo and I treated it like a Night Cinema interval event, basically shooting as much as I could. I shot a whole sequence from the hotel window as the sun set using the Takumar 50mm F1.4 and SB, my go-to setup. I did a number of walks around the local area with the same setup. Each time I went out I liked using the setup more, and each time I reviewed the files I liked the images I got from it more as well. After China I was feeling like it was a bit too vintage / low-fi but I've really warmed to it since. I found myself a bit at odds with Japanese culture, especially in regards to the fervent dislike of badly-behaved foreigners and the locals dislike for being filmed in public (despite the fact no-one will tell you they don't like it), so I mostly filmed the place and not the people, or at least I didn't tend to film individual people, instead including them small in the frame, or en-mass, or out of focus. I think that lent itself to the cultural experience as well. The city, and to many extents the culture, dwarfs the individual, placing the focus on the group. As a tourist I can only glimpse the culture from afar, so taking the perspective of the outsider in the compositions is very much representative of the experience. My "big" outing was a walk from Shibuya to Harajuku on our last night there. As these places are known for youth and fashion and culture (and the counter-culture that fashion normally draws from) I concentrated on the grittier side of these areas. I also leaned into the layers and the overall chaos of the place, taking advantage of the Takumars ability to focus on a small slice of the chaos, both through the 70mm FOV and also the shallow DOF. Back in the small town I did more "test" walks with the TTartisans 50mm F1.2 (100mm F2.4 equivalent), the Helios 44M + SB combo (82mm F2.8 equivalent) and Takumar + SB combo for comparison (71mm F2.0). As the small town was much less dense I found the extra reach of the TTartisans to be useful, and the DOF was shallow enough to be useful at distance, and the image was much cleaner across the frame compared to the Tak. The Helios 44M was a different beast. I felt like I was fighting with it basically the whole time and came back from the shoot thinking it was a bust and I'd wasted an outing. The FOV often seemed wrong, it lacked the aperture to get enough light to the sensor and I was pushing the ISO a lot, the DOF was also deeper and so I found myself having to get closer to objects to get the separation I wanted, which then meant I was too close and the parallax motion from my hand-held movement was really distracting. The focus on my copy is very stiff and it is a very low gear so to go from distance to closer focus had the ergonomics of opening a jar where something sticky had gotten into the threads. Still, I got back from the shoot and lots of the images looked really nice, which I think is to do with the extra diffusion this has. It was also better behaved on the edges of the frame compared to the Tak too. One thing that isn't obvious from the frame grabs is the ghosting from the strong light-sources in frame, and because I shoot hand-held and have IBIS active, they move in unnatural ways. At first I thought they were coming from my vND but if anything they got worse on both the TTartisans and Helios after I took it off. I think due to this I'll have to lean into the imperfections in the grade and edit and go lo-fi, which is why I've applied a film emulation softening equivalent to 20mm film to the Helios footage. I also shot a lot with the iPhone 17 while there, normally during the day for non-cinema purposes, but that's a different topic for another time.

No doubt. I have a 5DMII that I think still delivers in this regard as well. What I have is good enough for me, so I've decide, "Eh, I'll stay where I'm at." (for now) 😉