richg101

AF for cinema?... WTF? And it isn't actually bad at all. Pretty fast for stills given live-view on a full frame sensor. You want to see Canon's live view AF speed?... have fun with that.

 

And what Canon are we talking about here exactly? A DSLR? They have terrible ergonomics for video. Fine for stills.

 

When an idiot wanders onto the forum... I'm always wondering why they say the things they do... must be a reason. Weird.

You need severe learning difficulties to struggle with the ergonomics of the a7s.  I mean so severe you've got close to zero motor functions and need a full time carer.  It's nearly impossible to struggle with the a7s.  I love stupid trolls since they donlt even have the ability to upset people vie the internet.

it'll have been funded by a partner (probably in the scientific/space/aero industry) and then the tech will filter into the rest of the markets in due course - likel ya year after it;s initially used on a camera system costing millions.  This is why the high sensitivity and very fast shutter is probably a design criteria.  Sony are rather clever.  People (including me) said we didnt need 36mpx on a full frame sensor and then sony developed a 36mpx sensor for the d800 - probably largely funded by nikon.  then they offer the same sensor for 1/3rd the price in the a7r a year later!  I woudlnt shoot with anything lower than 36mpx for landscapes since using the a7r.

This sensor is gonna be wild and i cant wait to see this tech getting down to us lowly peasants 

2x Tokina +0.4's for sale to regular EOSHD'ers for £150 + shipping,  Brand new, never used - still in boxes.  Available to regular posters only!

lots of nice 35mm f2.8's.  All of Zeiss Quality, preset lenses with fluid apertures and long focus pulls. in T-Mount which can be adapted to pretty much anything (even PL mount). made by Tokina Koki in the 1970's, most with single coatings and labeled with various different brand names.  All are early Tokina and in great shape.  Beautiful lenses.

I also have some bloody lovely Sankor 35mm f2.8's of a slightly earlier date.  Loads of them were bought up as possible ff35 donors but they're too nice to ruin!!  I'll keep a couple for myself, but there are a number avail if people want them.

£50 per lens + shipping

1x Schneider Cinelux ES.  - £160 + shipping

3x Bell and Howell single focus anamorphics - beautiful flare, awesome for bmpcc - £100 each + shipping

Olympus Zuiko Set 24f2, 35f2, 55f1.2 and 85f2 - a lovely bunch of lenses that I'm happy to split up - make me an offer:)

Rich

the easiest way to lower ca is to use a smaller sensor or close aperture down a bit.  

I think the way you could modify the LA7200 for improved overall image performance is this method...

1.firstly attach your favourite/best performing taking lens to the la7200 and mark out where you need to set the lens in order to obtain infinity through the la7200.

2.separate the front and rear optics of the LA7200

3.place a SLR magic +0.33 diopter on the front. (or similar achromatic diopter with relatively low strength.  dont go stronger than +1) - it needs to be achromatic.

4. with the taking lens set to how you had it to get infinity, now change the distance between the two LA7200 optical elements in the same way he's doing on the video above.  Adjust it until the image is sharp at infinity.

5.  mark out the exact distance you need the two LA7200 elements to be spaced in order for it to be sharp at infinity.

6. make a frame to hold the optics in their new position.

what you will have done with this mod is changed the 2 element original design which is Afocal (it has no focal length), added a diopter which changes the total focal length of the la7200 diopter to a 1000mm focal length (for a +1 diopter) or a 3300mm focal length (for the slr magic +0.33) and changes the lens into a 'quasi' 4 element design, obtaining the correction properties from the achromatic diopter.  reducing the spacing between the two original LA7200 optical elements will counteract the magnification effects effects of the diopter and will bring the focal length back to 'Afocal'.  when infinity is achieved it means the lens is back to its afocal state, but with the achromatic diopter helping it out.

The stronger the diopter, the more you will need to change the distance between the two original la7200 elements so the +0.33x diopter will be a great purchase.  the included +1.3x diopter will also be helpful in getting closer and sharpening a little more I imagine:)

All theory, but i should work and will be a fun project if you can afford to take the risk!

The kowa has an anamorphic 'look' that the schneiders dont.  since the schneiders are simply very modern 2 element designs you loose some of the lovely internal reflections that come from the 6 elements inside a kowa or similar lens.

The glass inside the schneiders is as expensive as it can get - seriously high end glass types meaning less elements are needed to correct things like in the older kowas.  usually it's best to have as few elements as possible.  However since we're shooting for the look, the schneiders do have a bit of a clinical quality to them due to the lack of flaws from multiple elements cemented and assembled by hand.  

I do believe it may be beneficial to promote misting or even fungus growth in the schneiders to provide some internal stuff for light to interact with!  maybe even set some uv filters along the inside barrel to provide more surfaces?  sine they're coming up cheap maybe we could start some type of 'ruin a cinelux' concept!!!

you know you got a lens that is sharp when you try and align it with the fpcus on the taking lens in a dual focus style and realise you can keep tweeking and keep tweeking and it just keeps getting sharper and sharper.

it's incredible.  literally no degradation to the sharpness of any lens.  

Rich, without any irony: You do many things, DSO, Isco service etc, why don't you do rehousing as well, if it's that easy?

tbh i never really saw any point in the process on the iscorama since i find one of it's key selling points the protruding rear optic and its light weight plastic body.  the van diemen mod does away with these two golden attributes by adding weight and shrouding that rear optic meaning it can no longer be seated as deep into the taking lens.  I'm not saying it's an easy job, but assuming it takes me a few hours to do the close focus mod and a compete relube, it would take 10 mins longer to slip 3 pieces of aluminium over the internal cell and diopter rather than refitting the plastic shell.  

That said, I couldnt find the time to service my own iscorama, let alone start a service undercutting van diemen just to prove a point.  Maybe I just undervalue my own time and should be charging more, but when you get a guy handing over large quantities of money (way more than i;d have the bottle to charge for such a job) to a guy who seems to not value how important the lens is to the owner, I do start to question the reasons why this service seems so popular.  

I'm always amazed how many people have gone for this modification.  It's a huge amount of money for what equates to about 5hrs work and around £150 worth of machined aluminium.

I've worked on 5 iscorama's this year.  Making some which were unusable lumps of ruined glass or non moving focus helicoids back to full working order and have probably charged less than what he charges for a single job!  Granted I'm not rehousing them, but some have been close focus modded which is a couple of hours of very careful work.   

He must be absolutely raking it in from Iscorama mods alone.

Personally I'd not invest this much money on adding weight to the iscorama unless it provided non rotating front upgrade as the group buy offered.

Scary amounts of money being thrown for a rather basic job IMO

Apologies if this has already been posted but I was just wondering the relevance of Diopters (such as as the Tokina 0.4) given that the new FM module is able to focus from 50cm to Infinity?

 

 

The tokina is something that will always find use and is a great addition to anyone's lens collection.  personally I'd still rather use an achromatic diopter and limit the minimum focus of the fm module to 1m or longer, using a diopter to get closer.  the magic of the tokina is that it'll allow racking from 2.4metrs down to half of the minimum focus of the lens it is attached to.  

The Tokina would be a lot more valuable to you if it were 105mm, but i imagine you'll still get better results from using the tokina than racking those two optics farther and farther apart on the fm module.

Also since the cineluxes are rather long, they limit how wide taking lens you can use meaning the 72mm diameter might not be as much as a limitation as the 105mm front of the fm module might suggest.

looks stunning.  no complaints here.  I still can;t get my head round how the A7S is the first camera of this size to deliver such impressive imaging.  

**The below comments assume we are all aware that use of anamorphics is no longer something we do in order to maintain resolution since most anamorphic lenses degrade the resolving power more than the act losing pixels through cropping**

IMO use of anamorphic for the majority of our purposes should be undertaken with the fastest and sharpest taking lens available - particularly on smaller sensors.  

Since our use of anamorphics is an aesthetic choice rather than an attempt to maintain resolution, there is not much point in shooting anamorphic if the dof is so deep, and with no separation between in/out of focus parts of the frame, the aesthetic is no longer noticeable.

I think one of the main reasons anamorphics like the SLR magic 1.33x have had such a bad time is that firstly it works best with wider lenses and smaller sensors, and slower apertures (meaning dof is so deep the already weak 1.33x look is even less obvious). - it's a disaster combination and why such lenses don;t command much respect from anamorphic purists.

I feel if a anamorphic requires the taking lens to be closed to f5.6, on an m4/3 sensor the anamorphic is not up to the task of the sensor it is being used on, the user loses a lot of the 'look' from anamorphic.  And adds hassle, weight, and unpleasant optical degradations into the equation.  The end result often just looks like spherical cropped to 2.35 with a gaussian blur and CA added in post.

to me a rough guide / criterion similar to this should be considered in order to make the job of shooting anamorphic a worthwhile choice (without unpleasant degradations to resolving power, CA, etc), while maintaining some type of anamorphic 'look' :- 

1. using full frame the anamorphic needs to be able to accommodate an 85mm @f5.6 or faster, or a 50mm @f4 or faster 

2. using aps-c / s35 a 50mm @f4 or faster, or a 35mm @f2.8 of faster

3. using m4/3 a 35mm @f2.8 or faster, or 25mm @f2 or faster

4. gh4/4k mode will need a 30mm at f2 or faster, or a 18mm @ f1.4

5. s16mm (bmpcc) will need a 20mm at f1.4 or a 12mm at f1.0

The lens speed can be 1 stop slower for every lens focal length step, for instance using an f-135mm lens on full frame would still look anamorphic set at f8.  a 200mm lens would still look anamorphic when closed down to f11.  

a separation between in/out of focus areas is a critical attribute you need for anamorphic shooting to be beneficial for most uses.  

yeah.  if moisture got it, it'll come out.  as suggested some silica gel pouches.  keep in direct sunlight till they arrive to stall any chance of fungus starting to grow.

in the future use isopropyl to clean lenses of this era.  anything with water in it is likely to be a bad idea if applied heavily.

items get sent to a central ebay depot buy the seller - then that depot posts it to you the buyer - hence the ebay tape on the package

So I assume a seller packages a beautiful iscorama to survive the journey, then some dumb ass muppet in the depot opens it up to check it is what it's meant to be, then poorly repacks it then when it arrived broken, both you and the seller are left to sort it out!  

It angers me when customs are able to open items they clearly have no skills in handling.  I need to get some 'if tape seal is broken, check contents before signing for parcel' tape for DSO 

indeed.  stick the nd on the taking lens:)  When we start talking about putting filters on the front of a lens with 105mm filter threads we should also be talking about 6x6 nd's and matte boxes.  this is NOT, a run and gun solution.  

If anyone thinks they'll be using vari nd's on the front of this thing, think again.  the front rotates.  Also, since we have a 105mm front i assume this thing is made to go WIDE.  And as we know, vari nd's and wide angles are not a nice combination.

If I had the bunse I'd buy it and probably make some type of head mount and fit it to my eye.

Sorry to hear you've had problems with it.  Personally I always get quite excited when I see the global shipping program option on items I might be interested in.  - as long as the item isn't high value.

Assuming I want to buy something for $80 + $20 shipping, to be shipped from the USA to the UK, If I buy it and they declare the value as $80usd I tend to get hit with the tax ($25), import duty ($10) plus a terrible admin fee from the handler (normally £12).  overall with the taxes and admin fee the price has gone up by almost 50% - for nothing!.  

With the global program I usually end up avaoiding having to pay tax on the shipping and also avoid the admin fee.  it tends to save around £20.  Buying big items with this process is a bad move because you end up paying the tax in advance when you may not end up paying anything if it gets through without a check by customs personnel.  The admin fee and tax on shipping costs you save is less of a big deal on something of high value.

I do notice that items bought through the program always tend to have been packed rather badly.  with the ebay branded tape usually poorly applied without care.  Always wondered what the process is and why there is ebay tape on the item.

I use this one.  It's surprisingly good.  i'm actually thinking about upgrading the ir led to something heftier for longer range!

 

 

Richg101 what lenses do you like best for humans?

 

 

My personal favourite is the Noritar 80mm f2 on full frame, wide open.  Or notched down to f2.8 for that slight increase in sharpness on the eyes.  second best is the helios 44.  Both happen to be Double Gauss designs.

My personal favourite lens I've used for humans..  An FF58 I wish I'd never let go:( :-

the description actually talks about some of the points I bring up earlier:) 

Whack me on the list please:)  

That's wide.  what imaging area are you projecting onto for the 180deg's?  I assume if it's a zoom the aperture will be small and thus we'll not see any anamorphic defocus artefacts?  I'm amazed you've managed to squeeze all of the required elements into such a short assembly.  I'm guessing for s35mm you'll need at least 4-6 elements to do the afocal fish eye front, 2 for the focus diopters and then the anamorphic + zoom in that little space.  Unless it's bigger than it looks?  

resolving power (optical resulution) and contrast are directly related yet can co-exist as a miss matched combination.

for example a high resolution, but low contrast lens - one which is designed with a high level of correction to limit the effects of CA and other nasty attributes could be finished in less effective anti reflective coatings and thus be able to resolve detail but yield a lower contrast image.  

So..  in LP/mm terms the lens might resolve very clean steps between the black and white lines on a chart, BUT, due to the lower contrast caused by low efficiency AR coatings the black lines might be lifted (to a dark grey) and the whites will be darkened somewhat due to the light transmission losses caused by refections within the lens.   The effect to the eye is a lower perceived sharpness - despite the fact that the detail is there.  

Contrast directly affects how sharp an image looks and therefore can be used to fill in the gaps and smooth an image.  a low contrast lens with high resolving power is a very powerful tool - even if you need a sharp looking image since you can apply more sharpening and more of a boost in contrast in post before it starts to look nasty and over processed.

If i were shooting buildings I'd be using Schneider Digitars which outresolve pretty much every dslr lens in existence.  But for humans I'd rarely use anything made within the last 20-30 years because they make human beings look like cgi.  

I second the suggestion of the Kinetals.  they've gone up a little recently, but are still cost effective.  as are the Schneider 16mm lenses in arri standard mount.

I find that for 99% of situations S-Log on the a7s is pointless.  Particularly since most of us shooting with the a7s don't have the capabilities to post process a log profile effectively.

The creative styles are very powerful tools - particularly with the a7s since the dr is a lot greater than the same creative styles on most of the other sony/nex cameras.  you can actually pull down the highlights or pull up the shadows quite effectively if required, and get some of the apparently lost data back.

My personal favourite is the 'Neutral' creative style.  but with the sharpness and contrast dialed down to -3.  saturation left untouched.  

granted there are some peaked reds, but since I was shooting at 16000iso for the majority, letting the camera do auto exposure (due to the fast paced workflow required), where 95% of the light was coming from neons and other nasty lights.  Very little grading was applied to the footage.

magical.  just imagine that with a 85mm f2 on full frame!