QuickHitRecord

I was looking at one of my beloved Kern Switars yesterday evening and noticed a little string of fungus in it. I haven't been using them as much since my professional work has robbed me of any time for passion projects as of late. The pandemic hasn't helped either.
Anyway, I looked at a few more lenses and saw more more fungus. I ripped my whole lens drawer apart, and found that I have confirmed or suspected fungus on FOURTEEN of my lenses. I need to go back, wipe the front and rear elements down with some pancro, and look at them again when I am not in such a panicked state. But yeah, it's bad. Duclos-modded Nikkor AIS lenses, Tokina AT-X 28-70 2.8, Lumix 12-60mm, and even my backup Canon EF-S zooms (including the 70-200 f4 IS). This is pretty much my perfect nightmare scenario; something I have been extremely careful to avoid since I started building my collection 14 years ago. The silver lining is that it hasn't reached my Sigma Art Primes or Canon L Zooms that I use for work (I keep them in my camera case). I am SO glad that I never got around to building a set of Leica Rs or OKS in Oct-19 mount. And after this experience, I don't think I ever will.
How did this happen? I have a theory. I bought maybe my third copy of the Helios-44 from Ukrainian seller in 2020. I inspected it closely for fungus as I always do and didn't see any traces. Then the pandemic began, and I really didn't touch my lenses for about a year (nothing to shoot). When I finally did pick up the Helios again, I noticed that it had a contamination. I isolated it and sold it for next to nothing to someone who wanted to try to clean it. That's the only time I'd seen fungus grow in a lens while in my possession, so my theory is that a previous owner had cleaned it, and then the fungus came back and infected my other lenses. But that's all speculation.
The other thing is that we don't have an exhaust fan in the bathroom here. In the winter, we wake up most mornings to find the windows largely fogged over. There's a lot of moisture in the air here, especially when we can't leave the windows open.
So, what's next? I'm trying to figure that part out. From what I can tell, the fungus hasn't advanced very far on any of these lenses, so I doubt they will affect the image quality if I can kill it before it grows. I've spent the day learning about ozone-free UVC lights so that I can start zapping all of my lenses regularly. I'm also leaning towards investing in a dry cabinet (anyone else use one of these?). But if I do that, I'll need to figure out the size needed, whether I also need to store my camera bodies in it (the Red One will be fun) and where it's going to go in my little office. I may also try to disassemble and clean some of the lenses myself, though previous attempts have yielded very mixed results, including discarding of lenses that I could never figure out how to re-assemble properly.
Part of me just wants to dump them into a big pile and douse them with gasoline. What can I say? It's been a pretty dark 24 hours for me. But, I keep reminding myself that it is just stuff and I lived a pretty normal life without ever picking it up for a year or longer.
Anyway, if you have any suggestions, ideas, or past experiences you'd like to share, let's hear them!

I'd be down.
Interchangeable lens cameras only?

So, turns out that hitting Command-Return instead of Shift-Return submits the post.  Who knew?
anyway, Part Two.
They have smaller apertures.
This might seem to be a disadvantage, but maybe not as much as you'd imagine.  Firstly, smaller apertures are easy to focus, so less shots with missed focus.  BOOM.  You're welcome.  Tell Panasonic (or whoever) I just upgraded their AF.
See if you can tell the difference in DoF between these?


No?  Well, F2.8 to F3.5 isn't much difference.
OK, let's get less fair.. What about these?


Sure, it's a small difference, but that's a two whole stops.  It's also many many hundreds of dollars.
Low light is definitely a difference here, that's true, so the kit zoom isn't really a low-light monster, but these lenses are practically free so you can't have everything!

Funnily enough, I actually used the stepper app in anger last year to go through all the profiles in an FZ2500 stepping through -5 to to +2 in contrast with saturation going from -5 to +3, so there were 72 permutations in all per profile.
I didn't bother with stepping through the sharpness and NR parameters as it wasn't relevant at the time as I was just looking at colour and contrast.
The idea was to see if there is any unconventional wisdom to be had such as using untapped settings such as Portrait with -4 contrast and +2 saturation etc as the end goal was to make a profile that could be used as an out of camera look that would play well on its own or to create one that played well with a particular emulation LUT.
I've always had this nagging thing about giving away too much colour and contrast in the capture because thats what everybody does to get a flat image and then has to add it back post capture with all the artefacts that can bring.
What I found interesting is that with everything except the two Cine profiles, there were some terrible artefacts happening (particularly in the sky) in some interactions between lower contrast and lower saturation and in fact the only way they cleared was when the saturation was actually boosted to +1 or +2.
That made me think that my suspicion about giving up the goods saturation wise potentially being a folly was quite accurate.
The two Cinelike profiles don't seem to share these issues but, of the two though, going by trying to retain saturation in the capture, I actually favoured what I saw from the usually less fashionable Cinelike V profile.
The net result was that with the stepper app, I ended up with a single video file where it was easy to see all this laid out and whilst the Cinelike V being preferable to my eye than the Cinelike D was a bit of an eyebrow raise, the process quickly let me eliminate the possibility of there being any particularly revolutionary permutations with the other profiles.
It saved an absolute shit load of time and as time is money then I used the saving to buy the V-LOG upgrade for the camera 😉 
 

I just learned about this and it's nothing short of brilliant. Did anyone ever post their results?

A few clips with the G85, trying to answer the question, "can I walk with it?". So, several longer walking shots:
I was expecting a resounding "No", but the answer is "sort of". If I had a top handle and had used a wider lens or my focal reducer (or a Power OIS lens), I might have gotten away with it.
Not wild about the color straight out of camera, but we can't have everything. This is a pretty fun camera to use. I owned an Olympus EM10iii for a while and I much prefer this. From time to time, I film protests. I think this camera would be a good fit for that.

Thanks! Getting going is always the hard part. And shooting something is always better than shooting nothing. Upgrade obsession is a hollow pursuit. I get sucked in too, though lately I find myself bored by videos that are trying to sell some expensive thing that is going to possibly make an incremental improvement to my kit. I hope you make it down to your art and garden center. I think you'll be happy that you went.

A few clips with the G85, trying to answer the question, "can I walk with it?". So, several longer walking shots:
I was expecting a resounding "No", but the answer is "sort of". If I had a top handle and had used a wider lens or my focal reducer (or a Power OIS lens), I might have gotten away with it.
Not wild about the color straight out of camera, but we can't have everything. This is a pretty fun camera to use. I owned an Olympus EM10iii for a while and I much prefer this. From time to time, I film protests. I think this camera would be a good fit for that.

Funny to see your post about this. I just picked up a G85 (same sensor as the GX85) for the very same reason. I shoot on Canon Cinema and occasionally RED for work but wanted something small and with a high stealth factor that had a good implementation of IBIS for tripod-free shooting. In this case, image quality was secondary. I haven't been shooting casually or for fun much lately and I am hoping that this camera will help bring me back to it.
I've paired mine with a Viltrox speedbooster and the inexpensive Sigma 17-50 f2.8. The camera seems to be detecting the focal lengths from this third-party lens and adjusting the IBIS perfectly. I have no plans to accessorize beyond this setup because that would be self-defeating!
I hope you share some of your work here.

A few clips with the G85, trying to answer the question, "can I walk with it?". So, several longer walking shots:
I was expecting a resounding "No", but the answer is "sort of". If I had a top handle and had used a wider lens or my focal reducer (or a Power OIS lens), I might have gotten away with it.
Not wild about the color straight out of camera, but we can't have everything. This is a pretty fun camera to use. I owned an Olympus EM10iii for a while and I much prefer this. From time to time, I film protests. I think this camera would be a good fit for that.

Thanks! Getting going is always the hard part. And shooting something is always better than shooting nothing. Upgrade obsession is a hollow pursuit. I get sucked in too, though lately I find myself bored by videos that are trying to sell some expensive thing that is going to possibly make an incremental improvement to my kit. I hope you make it down to your art and garden center. I think you'll be happy that you went.

Thanks! Getting going is always the hard part. And shooting something is always better than shooting nothing. Upgrade obsession is a hollow pursuit. I get sucked in too, though lately I find myself bored by videos that are trying to sell some expensive thing that is going to possibly make an incremental improvement to my kit. I hope you make it down to your art and garden center. I think you'll be happy that you went.

Yes, this was all heel-to-toe ninja walking on uneven ground at 17mm. The focal reducer will add a little weight and widen the shot the next time I go out. My camera also came with a Lumix 12-60mm Power OIS lens that I was planning on selling to bring the total camera cost down to around $325 (if I hadn't found this deal, I would have gone for a GX85). I might have to give Dual IS a try before I do. A top handle kind of breaks the rules in terms of a minimal setup (the whole point of this camera for me), but now I'm curious. I've been mostly a Canon shooter so IBIS is a new tool to me.

Thanks! Getting going is always the hard part. And shooting something is always better than shooting nothing. Upgrade obsession is a hollow pursuit. I get sucked in too, though lately I find myself bored by videos that are trying to sell some expensive thing that is going to possibly make an incremental improvement to my kit. I hope you make it down to your art and garden center. I think you'll be happy that you went.

Thanks! Getting going is always the hard part. And shooting something is always better than shooting nothing. Upgrade obsession is a hollow pursuit. I get sucked in too, though lately I find myself bored by videos that are trying to sell some expensive thing that is going to possibly make an incremental improvement to my kit. I hope you make it down to your art and garden center. I think you'll be happy that you went.

A few clips with the G85, trying to answer the question, "can I walk with it?". So, several longer walking shots:
I was expecting a resounding "No", but the answer is "sort of". If I had a top handle and had used a wider lens or my focal reducer (or a Power OIS lens), I might have gotten away with it.
Not wild about the color straight out of camera, but we can't have everything. This is a pretty fun camera to use. I owned an Olympus EM10iii for a while and I much prefer this. From time to time, I film protests. I think this camera would be a good fit for that.

A few clips with the G85, trying to answer the question, "can I walk with it?". So, several longer walking shots:
I was expecting a resounding "No", but the answer is "sort of". If I had a top handle and had used a wider lens or my focal reducer (or a Power OIS lens), I might have gotten away with it.
Not wild about the color straight out of camera, but we can't have everything. This is a pretty fun camera to use. I owned an Olympus EM10iii for a while and I much prefer this. From time to time, I film protests. I think this camera would be a good fit for that.

Ah crap - I was taking about the GX9.  Stupid typo!
I'm half-way through reading the Cine-D GX85 thread.  Funny how every time someone finds a hack there's someone who turns around and asks for 12K120 12-bit internal, like somehow once the genie is out of the bottle you can ask for whatever you want 🙂 
I worked this out last night.  
Long story short, it's about edges.  The world has infinite resolution, and therefore edges are 100% sharp.  Everything in the real world, ie, physical processes, will only make edges softer.  Film has limited grain size and thus blurs the edge slightly, lenses are imperfect and have blur, etc.  If you shoot RAW you will get edges that are slightly blurred because of de-bayering and limited resolution (no camera is infinite resolution).  
If you get a nice compression algorithm and give it enough bandwidth you will also get edges that are slightly blurred.  All good so far.  Where it all goes wrong is when you have compression that makes the edges more sharp than reality.  ie, the pixels on the darker side of the edge are darker than the object itself, and the pixels on the edge of the lighter side are lighter than the object itself.  This NEVER happens in the physical world.  It never happens with film, it never happens shooting RAW, it is a completely artificial process.
This is why some footage looks "organic" (ie, of the physical world) and some looks "digital" (ie, not of the physical world).
Note the "halos" around this image I found on the web:

You either like footage to look natural, or you want it to be hyper-real.  It's a matter of taste.

I have a Red One MX and it produces a beautiful image, perhaps my favorite image from any digital sensor. But it's size, weight, and power consumption have relegated it to my camera cabinet for anything but narrative work.

I have a Red One MX and it produces a beautiful image, perhaps my favorite image from any digital sensor. But it's size, weight, and power consumption have relegated it to my camera cabinet for anything but narrative work.

Funny to see your post about this. I just picked up a G85 (same sensor as the GX85) for the very same reason. I shoot on Canon Cinema and occasionally RED for work but wanted something small and with a high stealth factor that had a good implementation of IBIS for tripod-free shooting. In this case, image quality was secondary. I haven't been shooting casually or for fun much lately and I am hoping that this camera will help bring me back to it.
I've paired mine with a Viltrox speedbooster and the inexpensive Sigma 17-50 f2.8. The camera seems to be detecting the focal lengths from this third-party lens and adjusting the IBIS perfectly. I have no plans to accessorize beyond this setup because that would be self-defeating!
I hope you share some of your work here.

Funny to see your post about this. I just picked up a G85 (same sensor as the GX85) for the very same reason. I shoot on Canon Cinema and occasionally RED for work but wanted something small and with a high stealth factor that had a good implementation of IBIS for tripod-free shooting. In this case, image quality was secondary. I haven't been shooting casually or for fun much lately and I am hoping that this camera will help bring me back to it.
I've paired mine with a Viltrox speedbooster and the inexpensive Sigma 17-50 f2.8. The camera seems to be detecting the focal lengths from this third-party lens and adjusting the IBIS perfectly. I have no plans to accessorize beyond this setup because that would be self-defeating!
I hope you share some of your work here.

I've been enjoying my Canon Elan II. It feels almost exactly like my 5Diii and I can use the same lenses too. It definitely produces a look that I enjoy. Been experimenting with different film stocks too: https://distanceelevation.com/blog/2021/7/5/northcascadesgoatmountainheliotrope
The next step will be to do some of my own scans.

Thought I'd share that I have now successfully swapped out the fans in both of my FS300s, following the excellent video that @scotchtape posted. The first took me about an hour to do and the second, about half of that. The adapter cable from Amazon mentioned earlier in this thread works well. This modification makes a huge difference in the sound level coming from these lights.

Made a video