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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.

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) 😉

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?

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.

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).

I'd add IBIS upgrades to Kye's list of improvements - as I normally shoot handheld, that's been my main reason to upgrade my M43 cameras over the years. I still own an original G9 (derived from the GH5), but the Oly E-M1 iii and OM-1 I bought more recently have better IBIS. Although I've been a faithful M43 user for about 15 years (starting with a Pana G3), due to the lack of a modern video-orientated small M43 camera I ventured into full-frame with an S9 recently (when the price dropped a lot). Now I've had enough time to get used to it, I have to say the video quality from it is noticeably better than the M43 cameras I own - it seems to have a 'richness' that is attractive. I usually put a Smallrig leather half-case and Sigma 18-50 F2.8 APS-C lens on it, and it's great as a run-and-gun camera (even though it's only using about half the sensor area in APS-C mode).

This is a real thing and a very good point. To give a personal and recent example, I was asked on Thursday of last week to jump in at the last minute to help finish someone's feature over the weekend. I'm not sure of the details for why their DP became unavailable. The filmmaker had a shot list for Saturday that was 15 pages long taking place in 7 different locations - and both I and the other guy they brought in had a hard out at 4 or 5 in the afternoon. Sunday's agenda was similar, but without either of us needing to leave. We didn't finish the list for either day. Likely, we'll be shooting again next Saturday. It was all outdoors in parks, usually a several hundred meters from our cars. None of our usual suspect gaffers were available/handy. We had basically 0 time to light things and the director wanted a bunch of wides and tracking shots (both tend to take longer to light). Controlling the light in any meaningful way was not a realistic option. These are exactly the situations when an extra stop of dynamic range is nice to have to keep the sky at least a bit blue, but yet also still have some detail in some of the harsh shadows. Real tough situation for the filmmaker - they definitely want to keep quality high and have they great ideas, but there are also budgetary and delivery date realities - the difference between a real indie film set and a reddit comments section. 😉 (Also, RIP colorist - there are like 5-6 different color profiles in play across all of the cameras that were used between the original DP and both of us last weekend, hopefully they only have to match 2 or 3 within any given scene) I'm not sure what ASA 50 has to do with needing extra light on a sunny day. Assuming ~24 fps, that'd give a proper exposure at approximately F/16 in bright sunlight (1/48 second for 180 shutter + sunny 16 rule indicating a 1/50 shutter speed = close enough) and you'd still need to use ND to open up the aperture beyond that. I suspect those lights are for filling in the faces/front of talent in a wide, given that the sun is actually at about a 60-90 degree angle from the lights (judging by shadows). From where the cameras are pointed, the subjects will be backlit.

You'd think so, but no! If you're using like an f/1.2 lens, you can have surprisingly big dust spots on your sensor and never be any the wiser. The more stopped down, the more they appear. From what I remember, and I might be wrong about this, it's bascally the same effect as using a large diffuse light source vs a small point source - put your hand next to a white card near the large diffuse source and you'll get a blurry, indistinct shadow. Do the same with a small point source and you'll get a well-defined crisp shadow. It's the same on a smaller scale with sensor dust.

Well, I appreciate the mental exercises you're putting yourself through. The questions are interesting. Still, at the end of the day everyone's process is a bit different. Since arts and crafts are subjective, quantifying how those two things merge is only useful up to a point, imo. And, of course, that point is usually wildly different for all of us doing this stuff. I'd ask, do you really wanna chase what that means? It might always be ephemeral as context changes; slipping out of reach. And shouldn't such meaning remain in the realm of intuition anyway? Then again, maybe not. At least not for everybody. Perhaps being in a space without firm answers isn't interesting to you? Maybe striving for technical contentment at the limits of understanding is the thing you enjoy. That's cool too. Engineering can be artful in it's own way as well. Either way, keep poking around.

Good write up! I've run the gauntlet as well. My conclusion is that what you wrote above is the thing that'll get me through, so I accept it. And why not?

Hello all, Since I switched to photography I no longer use this amazing lens. It's a full zoom through (no diopters needed) 1.33x anamorphic lens. It hasn't been modified, but that can be done relatively easy. Since it's such a large lens it can be used on a variety of mounting systems. It has the Sony bayonet mount, comes with the original lens cover and also still has the original screw to tighten the lens. Lens itself is in great shape, so are the mechanical parts. Everything working perfectly! It's in great shape since I have always cared for it as best as I could. This lens used to be my baby and I long thought about keeping it since it's so rare. Then again, it deserves to be used for creative purposes. This video (created by Tito) is a good review of it. I'm looking for $1475,-. I can accept both PayPal or a regular bank transfer. I'm willing to ship worldwide, preferably insured however. So depending on where the buyer might live, shipping costs may differ. Shouldn't be that much really. All the best, Niels

I just did. Here is what Charlie Chicken thinks, "Thank you for asking me. I think Germany as a country is setting a good example to the rest of Europe by welcoming in immigrants. However it could also be to recover for their treatment of Greece, with an austerity plan that has been disasterous for that country. I think maybe it's time for the EU to end. It was an interesting experiment but ultimately the bond between countries is not where it should be and unlike the USA where each state ultimately tries to help the others, as there seems to be years of hostility built up, also perhaps echoing the paranoia of World War II, especially that of Germany's history in the way, teaming up with Italy and occupying France and bombing the UK. I don't know if what happened less than one hundred years ago is not still part of the struggle between your countries, especially with Germany as the "banking" leaders of the EU. Of course the US had the Civil War and this still affects us, in differences between the North and the South - but I think overall we worked through these differences especially since the North is just as racist as the South. "The underlying tension between nations in Europe combined with the incredibly high unemployment of its people, especially young people, in many European countries may in fact be affecting the moods of its citizens younger people. While I don't know much about you personally Patrick B. Rau, it is possible some of your "online" use of a "swear" word is a result of situational stress and emotion caused by economic unshakiness. But maybe not - who knows - online, we are all just reflections and projections of whom we really are. Woof."