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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.

So there are indeed some details in the video specs that will be of note to some. Internal RecordingH.264/H.265/MOV/MPEG-4 AVC 4:2:0 8/10-Bit 5674 x 2988 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/48.00/50/59.94 fps (200 to 300 Mb/s) 5184 x 3888 up to 23.98/24.00/25/29.97 fps (200 Mb/s) 4352 x 3264 up to 47.95/50/59.94 fps (300 Mb/s) 4096 x 2160 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94/100/120 fps (100 to 300 Mb/s) 3840 x 2160 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94/100/120 fps (70 to 300 Mb/s) 1920 x 1080 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94/100/120/200/240 fps (16 to 200 Mb/s) H.264 ALL-Intra/MPEG-4 AVC 4:2:2 10-Bit 4096 x 2160 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94 fps (400 to 600 Mb/s) 3840 x 2160 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94 fps (400 to 600 Mb/s) 1920 x 1080 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94/100/120 fps (200 to 400 Mb/s) Interesting to note that Panasonic have sidestepped the Micro HDMI bleating by just fucking it off altogether. Although it was playback only on the original anyway.

Well, they just launched the Canon R6V, so I hope Panasonic enjoyed their 20 hours of PR!

I may have dreamt this but either in Flickr itself or an external site that used it’s data, you were able to search by EXIF so you could look at the extremes of the lens range and in this case it would be to display all LX100 images at 24mm f1.8 and 70mm f2.8 which was a more informative way to do it. People can fuck up the composition and the processing but even they struggle to overcome the physics. Welcome to episode two of the series! Fixed. The EIS is an additional crop as far as I can recall.

Unless of course they got me mixed up with Gerald Undone.

From Canon's support people, someone has to examine the camera to determine the level of work, but a rough estimate of prices, based on the perceived difficulty is: Minor = $269 Standard = $359 Major = $499 That's before my CPS discount on repairs which is, I think, 30%. So I guess that'd be $180, $270, or $340, give or take. Added to the approx. $1,500 below new price (and about $1,100 below most used prices I've been seeing), that ain't bad at all. (Though I do really need to sell something now, my gear list is getting ridiculous - anybody want a used Z Cam E2-S6G in good shape with a bunch of accessories including the eND?)

That's a key point. Or "Kye" point, if you will. My handheld shooting drifts and sways a bit, as I like that sort of kinetic visual energy. Not all IBIS handle this camera movement AND stabilization elegantly. Rapid shifts of the image that are unwanted can happen. Fuji is a disappointment in this regard and it makes shooting my style of video with my X-T5 pretty much useless. Meanwhile I can "dance" pretty good with LUMIX and Olympus.

https://www.43rumors.com/just-announced-new-panasonic-lumix-l10/ I wasn't that interested until earlier today when I went to set my S9 up for the imminent season only to discover the audio on it has stopped working. Or is at least intermittent enough I can't use it until it's fixed and as there is zero chance of that happening before my season starts and I am between 2 countries so which to even have it fixed in, is a bit of an issue. So ordered a used S5ii from @Andrew - EOSHD favourite used camera emporium to tide me over. But then, less than 2 hours later, my YouTube feed gets flooded by the Lumix Bros who have been on another jolly and...actually, as above, wasn't particularly interested as I had my S9 as my compact C cam and social media unit...except, this would work even better, so probably going to put a preorder in as they should be available in June. The only thing I find odd is that every man and their dog has a video or press release and the only one's who don't seem to have mentioned it yet, is Panasonic Lumix themselves. Same funny old Lumix marketing department 🤔

It won't feature Ibis, probably, if they are about to keep the size. I could live with that.

Turns out I didn’t dream it. https://www.shutterdial.com However, what I did dream )or maybe they’ve removed the function) was that you could search by specific camera on addition to the focal length/aperture.

The Leica variants of the Panasonic cameras like the RX100 always hold their value far, far better so the initial premium that you pay is offset somewhat when you sell it. Join me next time for another episode of “Flimsy Justifications I Present To My Wife When Buying Cameras”. The good thing about a fixed lens camera is that you can just forget about all of that. What you’ve got is what you’ve got. When the full spec for the L10 comes out then I would look for some devil in the detail regarding this as well in the video modes. I saw something regarding it being 4.2.0 in some modes and 4.2.2 in others for example. Not sure about numbers but the Flickr pool for the LX100/ii should give you plenty of visuals to evaluate it. As with most pools on Flickr for older cameras I’d recommend going back to closer to the end and working forward as the advent of faster internet has led to a proliferation of any old shit being uploaded. People were a lot more selective ten years ago 😂 https://www.flickr.com/groups/dmc-lx100/pool/with/55214982443

This looked and sounded really good until they said there was no IBIS. I suppose this makes sense as they emphasized this is targeted for photographers, but I do hope they release a video focused model that includes IBIS because I would love a genuinely pocketable video camera like this.

A mix of two glass, Schneider cinelux front and Moller 32 on the rear. Taking lens was a Soviet Vega 20mm C mount

It's a pity we can't reply to these emails with something like "Is it just a hobby or a real business?" "Did you mean to send that email?" How do these marketing boffins come up with this tone-dead stuff - are they psychopaths? yes

What was this custom anamorphic, and what was the ground glass adapter? Liking the look

Simply unique :- )

@kye Sorry I have not published those porno links. My account somehow has been stolen, sorry again for this inconvenience. Thanks 🙏

I hope MPB have looked at this thread at some point because I’ve just had an email from them entitled “Was it just a phase?”. I thought it was going to be something punny about phase detect AF and trying to alert me to their range of manual focus lenses or some such but no, it’s suggesting that photography must’ve just been a phase because I haven’t bought anything from THEM for a while. Entitling the email “Is it because we have gone really quite expensive and frequently lose your mate’s cameras?” then I’d have agreed with them as that being the reason I haven’t bought anything from them for a while. My “phase” of being a photographer which began a comfortable three decades before your company even existed remains intact MPB but I tell you what is now a phase and that’s ever buying anything from you, you cheeky patronising pricks. When someone who has been a frequent customer since you began, you might want to look inward as to what might have caused their buying to fall off a cliff.

The video was an improvisation test focused on capturing the human face using my modded phone. It wasn’t a planned shoot, just a quick experiment to see how the device performs in real conditions. Unfortunately, many clips were deleted because I didn’t have a tripod and was holding the phone by hand, which made some recordings unstable or unusable.

Or in their QA department - for all I know, the first owner received the camera with the dust already in place! Maybe they didn't care or notice - if I hadn't been told of its existence, I don't think I'd have sat here with a lens off clicking through the ND filters and I probably wouldn't have seen it until I filmed something with a solid that happens to be behind it, probably stopped down a little bit. Anyway, I registered it with CPS. The website didn't want to give me a price estimate since based on my purchase date, it's likely under warranty (maybe?). So I sent them a note explaining that I bought it used, asking if there is a way to know if it's still under warranty from the original purchase date, and if not, what the price would be for them to remove the dust. Sadly, a somewhat vigorous shaking doesn't seem to have dislodged it and it didn't budge when I blasted a little air in through the exhaust (the intake is not in a place to have a direct path) This is the way!

OP hasn't logged in for 18 months and the post is over 2 years old, but I'm actually going down this rabbit hole right now. I bought the Neewer one below but don't recommend it because it clamps onto the touchscreen of the phone (and if you watch the reflections you can see the screen bend around the clamp!), plus is seriously bulky. The idea you need a large one isn't necessarily true - I have a range of ND filters and I found that if I hold a 46mm one up to my iPhone 17 in just the right spot it covers all the cameras with no vignetting. Having said that, as some (or all?) phones don't have apertures, you'll need enough ND to shoot wide open. I tested my iPhone 17 Pro a few days ago and discovered it needed more than 5 stops of ND in direct sun conditions, and from about 2-3 stops onwards became unusable with IR pollution, so mine is going to need my 4-stop ND, my 1-5 stop vND, and an IR cut filter. I've just ordered the Tiffen MagSafe one (that only claims to work for the iPhone 16, not my 17) and plan to attempt to modify it to work with my phone case and see if I can get it to work, and if the 58mm filter size covers all the lenses without vignetting (especially if it doesn't align properly).

The camera is here. As far as I can see, there is a single decent-sized piece of dust on one of the internal ND filters and that's it. I cannot see any other marks on the camera's sensor assembly. The speck is big enough that I could imagine it being a little bit visible on a big blue sky, but in a way that'd be not hard to clone out. I'm also going to have to experiment with shaking the camera a little bit and/or blasting a rocket blower into the vent holes/fans. It's hard to imagine how that little sucker got in there. Worst case, if I decided to send it to CPS, I have to assume it'd be a pretty cheap repair. Overall, I'll gladly trade that for the $1,500 price reduction vs new. 😅

The GH5 has been my workhorse for almost a decade now. For whatever reason, the need to move on from it has never been necessary, so I've stuck with it. For instance, AF is not an issue. Manual focus is how lenses get used by me. Slow-mo is a thing to do less of, not more of, imo. A full 10 years on, what does a different camera offer; like really offer? An extra stop of exposure? An extra bit of DR? Looking at a GH7 the thought is, "MMM, pretty nice." But then what? A big difference in ... what ... gets captured? Maybe the market has matured TOO much for me?

These are really nice. I've been to Japan once but these don't remind me of it much. I was staying in a suburb and didn't go out at night much. It looks like I missed some great things. You know when it's night time like this, I don't even notice lens imperfections much. It just seems natural when under that kind of light.

I don't want to side-track the thread by diving into IBIS but I find that mostly the specs of "stops of stabilisation" are meaningless, as the limiting factor is what it does when you reach the limits of the mechanism, not what stabilisation can do if you don't shake it that much. A much more meaningful factor in the performance of these mechanisms is the way it responds to movement, like the difference between the mode that stabilises by smoothing the shake and the one that emulates a tripod by eliminating it as much as possible. I also found the behaviour of the OG BMPCC and BMMCC to be excellent, being about 80% towards eliminating the movement but not quite being clinical about it, a very nice feeling response. Maybe I'm just using it in far more aggressive ways and therefore constantly pushing it to its limits. I really like the Dual IS where it combines the lens OIS with the IBIS too. I shoot everything up to 280mm equivalent handheld, and frequently shoot while tired, while hungry, while cold, while holding the camera in odd positions or at the very edge of my reach, etc, so this probably isn't something most people really test that much. I often look at shots I have taken and wonder why I didn't hold it a bit more still, or didn't pan a bit to the right, and then I remember I was shooting blind holding the camera out the window of a moving vehicle and framing in my head while paying attention to the posts flying past, or while walking down stairs into a cave while holding the camera in one hand and the handrail in the other trying not to hit my head. The Crop Zoom function is nice, if a bit limiting (it won't go past 1:1 so if you're shooting 4K you can't get much crop, whereas the GH5 and GX85 2x and 4x crop didn't care and gave you the extra reach regardless, with the ETC 1:1 mode giving you a 1:1 if you wanted it).

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) 😉

His choice... It's always a choice. Needless to say there's only so long you can go on liking cameras but never shooting anything with them. And the social media skit can make one thin skinned and insecure - people look up to you like a God, which is ridiculous, or tear you down - not much in-between. So while part of me understands The Gerald Dilemma, the main part of me thinks, well, he chose to milk it for all it was worth didn't he? And it was a very privileged position that many would kill to be in, he could have used it as a springboard into an artistic career, but there wasn't an artist inside, nothing on the springy board. The problem is the system. YouTube / Alphabet is a billion dollar industry based off the hard work of content creators, who get a very small share of the overall pie and Google's Ad Business the lion's share. The internet has pivoted from a place where the artist owned the platform themselves (own website, own server) thus able to keep the benefits of 100% of their labour, to big tech owning the platforms and us becoming mere commodities as consumers/creators in a hive mind, whereas before we were founders, builders and owners as well as artists. The shift is noticeable in the language too. In 2012 we were all saying 'filmmakers' or 'musicians', but now everybody is lumped in together as a 'content creator', which got shortened even further to simply 'creator'. It's really dystopian shit. This is at the heart of what created The Gerald Dilemma - being a little pawn in a PR machine and ad industry rather than an individual. Being on a treadmill of content creation for the benefit mainly of big tech platforms. I don't see how anyone can take any personal satisfaction from it other than the money.

Oneplus 8 pro modded with Vega 20mm wide open with custom anamorphic lens, Motioncam pro app.

8-bit rec709 profiles are much more flexible in post than you might think. I'm not saying they're as good as an Alexa or whatever, but they're a million miles better than people give them credit for. Here's a latitude and WB torture test of the GX85, in the standard profile (8-bit rec709) customised to have reduced contrast but normal saturation. For each of the below, the left image is the properly exposed reference image, the middle one is the graded image, and the one on the right is the image SOOC. Exposure latitude test - +3 stops: Exposure latitude test - +2 stops: Exposure latitude test - +1 stops: Exposure latitude test - -1 stops: Exposure latitude test - -2 stops: Exposure latitude test - -3 stops: Exposure latitude test - -4 stops: Exposure latitude test - warm: Exposure latitude test - cool: Exposure latitude test - magenta: Exposure latitude test - green (as far as it would go!): Notes on the testing method: GX85 shot in manual mode on cloudy day Exposure varied by changing lens aperture WB varied by changing colour temp and tint Tools used in Resolve were mostly Lift/Gamma/Gain, saturation, and some had a bit of Shadows/Mids/Highlights Notes on the results: If it's clipped then it's clipped, there's no getting around that If you've shot a whole sequence in the wrong WB then shoot a test chart replicating the error, spend some time on the correction, then apply to all the shots... a bit of work but worth it to rescue a days shooting If you've shot on auto-exposure / auto-WB and want to correct the small errors then this is easily possible - it won't have gotten it nearly as wrong as what I have shown above Most cameras shooting in rec709 will do funky stuff to colours depending on their luma value as part of the look of the profile, so when you over/under expose and then pull things back the hues and saturation levels will have shifted around in odd ways compared to a normal exposure, but if it's a real shoot then you most likely won't have many dominant hues in the image and you only have to correct the ones that are in the frame and distracting, so the above is far more work than normal shooting would be The days of needing RAW or even LOG to change exposure or WB in post are gone, and although the rec709 profiles often have lower DR than log profiles, they're much better than you think. If anyone wants me to post full-sized versions with titles so you can flick back and forth then just let me know. Happy shooting!