Tito Ferradans

I love this place as I find inspiration and positive energy here, so I don't like posting something negative, but I feel you need to be warned.
A month ago I paid @Ebrahim Saadawi for a SLR Magic Rangefinder he offered for sale both on this site and on dvxuser. He had previously done an extensive review of the Rangefinder, also posted on the EosHD forum. I assumed he was selling this unit; he told me he had no use for it and no interested buyers in Egypt. As he claimed there were no other payment options in Egypt than Western Union money transfer and knowing his excellent track record on the forum, I decided to give it a go. Yeah, really stupid me I guess.
He went totally silent after my payment confirmation on June 17th. I sent four update requests since then through the forum's message service, which he all read (the site shows you this). Also messages through Instagram and email. Still no reply. Being certain (and baffled) that I was scammed I was considering what to do. Then I read @Tito Ferradans cautionary tale in Facebook's anamorphic shooters group of a LOMO scam he barely escaped (he also posted that on this site). On Facebook, another group member, Tomas, mentioned he also bought a Rangefinder from Egypt. Same seller, same story.
So we have the second highest rated EosHD account ever (second only to Andrew himself) through which at least two people have been scammed. Now here is the catch: the account of Ebrahim is used by two people. Ebrahim senior, and his grandson Ebrahim junior (the profile signature also mentions this). The other buyer did get in contact with the seller, which turned out to be Ebrahim junior.
It looks like Senior has build quite the reputation with posts I myself have also greatly enjoyed and learnt from. Junior pisses all over it now with this crap. We'll see if this post helps him reconsider, at any rate, other forum members may be prevented of becoming 'fools' (as Junior so sympathetically described me).
 

If you're following the facebook conversation, there's a deeply disturbing chat there. I'm not involved and my blood is boiling.

Good thing you got your money back!
I'm usually over-cautious.
I booked a trip to Amsterdam just to meet up with the seller when I bought my Isco 36.
With most of the equipment I buy here in Sweden, I also meet up with the sellers and inspect the goods thoroughly - about 90% of the time. I can make exceptions when it's cheaper lenses.
I have however even backed out of buys even after meeting up.
One incident I remember very well is when I met up with a guy selling a Nikon lens that was about 5 years old, no mention of any bad condition in the ad. First thing I noticed when we met up was how the front of the lens was totally fogged up and dusty, no way you could test shoot with the lens being like that. I hadn't even thought about needing to bring some lens cleaning equipment with me. Also, considering that such a recent lens was in such a condition, and that the seller did not even mention it in the ad made it easy to decide to back out of the buy quickly...
I also suspected that the lens might have been stolen - I haven't ever met up with a photographer trying to sell a lens that he hasn't at least tried to wipe clean.

The past month and a half were a thrilling roller coaster ride with PayPal and unsure if the seller was true to his word or not. It turned out he wasn't, but I still got my money back.
If you want more info and the whole story, read http://www.tferradans.com/blog/?p=9173
Have you ever had trouble with sellers or buyers and products that were different than advertised?

The past month and a half were a thrilling roller coaster ride with PayPal and unsure if the seller was true to his word or not. It turned out he wasn't, but I still got my money back.
If you want more info and the whole story, read http://www.tferradans.com/blog/?p=9173
Have you ever had trouble with sellers or buyers and products that were different than advertised?

Apologies in advance if this is widely known.  Personally, I've never found a really good explanation of why front anamorphs produce oval bokeh and rear anamorphs don't, despite reading my fair share of patents, technical papers, internet gossip and the like.  Feeling that my own understanding needed some firming up I finally set up some paraxial models and went through the math in gory detail.  It all boils down to how front and rear converters alter (or don't alter) the f/#, and basic DOF type circle of confusion calculations.  It has nothing to do with higher order aberrations, or the shape of the front lens, or various mechanical aspects of the lens.
Briefly:
1) A front anamorph is just a special case of a front afocal attachment, and as a result it preserves the f/# of the lens its attached to.  With an anamorphic front lens the focal length is shorter in the powered axis than in the non-powered axis.  For example, consider a 2:1 anamorph attached to a 100mm f/2 spherical lens.  In this case the net focal length is 50mm in the powered axis and 100mm in the non-powered axis, but in both cases the aperture remains f/2.  If you venture into the weeds to do circle of confusion calculations for a given object-space defocus you discover that a de-focused point source evaluated at the image plane is an ellipse with an aspect ratio of 4:1.  However, you only need to de-squeeze the image by 2x to correct the in-focus geometry, so you are left with de-focused ellipses with an aspect ratio of 2:1.
2) A rear anamorph is just a special case of a rear-mounted teleconverter, and as a result it *does not* preserve the f/# of the lens its attached to.  In particular, in the powered axis the aperture becomes slower.  For example, consider an 50mm f/2 spherical lens with a 2x rear anamorph.  Here the net focal length is 100mm in the powered axis, but the aperture has dropped to f/4, and is still 50mm f/2 in the non-powered axis.  When you do the circle of confusion calculations with object-space defocus you find the on-sensor defocused image to be an ellipse with a 2:1 aspect ratio.  When you desqueeze by 2x this defocus ellipse becomes a perfect circle.
Bottom Line:  Rear anamorphs have circular bokeh because they *don't* preserve the f/# of the spherical lens in both axes, while front anamorphs have elliptical bokeh because they *do* preserve the f/# of the spherical lens in both axes.

www.tferradans.com/anamorphic - for overall information about your questions!
and I would recommend a Century Optics small adapter (or the SLR Magic 1.33x Anamorphot) as an all arounder with nice flares, distortion and edge artifacts.
http://tferradans.com/blog/?p=7670

The 1.33 doesn't come with the diopters. They're usually sold together, but it's not mandatory. As for the 2x, you can see its performance with the close ups in my review - http://tferradans.com/blog/?p=8331. I'd STRONGLY recommend having diopters for proper results using the Anamorphot 2.0x
Andrew Chan, from SLR Magic, recommended testing another 85mm with the 2x anamorphot, since the Jupiter 9 gave weird results, but I haven't had time to do that yet.

www.tferradans.com/anamorphic - for overall information about your questions!
and I would recommend a Century Optics small adapter (or the SLR Magic 1.33x Anamorphot) as an all arounder with nice flares, distortion and edge artifacts.
http://tferradans.com/blog/?p=7670

SOLD.

SOLD.

Modify again by adding a negative diopter in side, better accurate focus at infinity, not so wide, measured view angle equals to about 24mm, but distortion improved.  Edge IQ might be not so good.  But still much better than 1.33x lens I used before.  Flares are funny.

The 0.33 Minolta is nice, achromat also (at least, if it's the one for the 100-500mm zoom). Tito uses it regularly in his videos. I have the 67mm diopter from Asahi Pentax and measured it...indeed 0.33 also. If you want to know precisely how strong your Pentax diopter is, focus on infinity with the diopter attached. Measure the distance from sensor to the focus plane. Diopter strength = 1/(max focus distance in meters). Oh, if you do, let us know, I'll update the list :-) Cheers.

Phew, this one is wrapped. Using different methods, I managed to get a decent cut, and here's a detailed tutorial on how to do it yourself!
http://www.tferradans.com/blog/?p=8922

To test out horizontal fov and wideness, try the Anamorphic Calculator!
http://www.tferradans.com/blog/?p=8615

To test out horizontal fov and wideness, try the Anamorphic Calculator!
http://www.tferradans.com/blog/?p=8615

No, they aren't, unfortunately (...as mentioned above ;-)) Could still be useful though.
Here's a list I made a while ago https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cEzX4hb0NKbhPetTkVsnORNHeGnji7lhB4OmuCdQC-g/edit?usp=docslist_api

Nice one Tito!
Overall I'd say I agree that story is far more important than lenses/ gear. If it's captivating you're not focusing on the quality too much. I think that the night shots also helped hide some of the lenses imperfections better than broad daylight would have. There were a few shots in there that I thought "well that looks really soft", but as I said it didn't stop me from watching it. At a guess I would say it was the small Century, but I couldn't be sure on that (I don't own any of them).

I shot a small narrative (I won't call it a "short") mixing all 1.33x anamorphic adapters with various taking lenses. The goal was to test out if all that talk of "this adapter is good, this one is bad", to see if we can actually notice the difference between lenses when there's a story being told. I included both well lit and low light shots to evaluate performance with different apertures. The camera used was Kinefinity's Kinemini 4k, and I shot it all raw for more flexibility in post. Taking lenses were all Russian, from 28 up to 135mm. The blog post has a cheat chart with all the data for each shot.
Can you tell when this or that lens is being used? Is there anything in particular that bugs you? Do you think this test makes the difference between 1.33x adapters easier to notice?
Lenses used were Century Optics WS-13, Panasonic LA7200, Isco 16:9 Video Attachment I, SLR Magic Anamorphot 1.33x-50, Century Optics 16:9 (the small one).
http://www.tferradans.com/blog/?p=8333
There's more info on the blog post above, but if you're feeling lazy, here's the video.
 

When you rack focus with your taking lens is pushing the limits of the anamorphic's image quality, because the anamorphic block is set to infinity. So having a focusing solution ties the whole system together and by having both anamorphic and taking lens at infinity you get their focus to sync. Kind of confusing when put in words, let me know if you get it. hahahah
(thanks, man! it was fun doing it!)

I shot a small narrative (I won't call it a "short") mixing all 1.33x anamorphic adapters with various taking lenses. The goal was to test out if all that talk of "this adapter is good, this one is bad", to see if we can actually notice the difference between lenses when there's a story being told. I included both well lit and low light shots to evaluate performance with different apertures. The camera used was Kinefinity's Kinemini 4k, and I shot it all raw for more flexibility in post. Taking lenses were all Russian, from 28 up to 135mm. The blog post has a cheat chart with all the data for each shot.
Can you tell when this or that lens is being used? Is there anything in particular that bugs you? Do you think this test makes the difference between 1.33x adapters easier to notice?
Lenses used were Century Optics WS-13, Panasonic LA7200, Isco 16:9 Video Attachment I, SLR Magic Anamorphot 1.33x-50, Century Optics 16:9 (the small one).
http://www.tferradans.com/blog/?p=8333
There's more info on the blog post above, but if you're feeling lazy, here's the video.
 

I shot a small narrative (I won't call it a "short") mixing all 1.33x anamorphic adapters with various taking lenses. The goal was to test out if all that talk of "this adapter is good, this one is bad", to see if we can actually notice the difference between lenses when there's a story being told. I included both well lit and low light shots to evaluate performance with different apertures. The camera used was Kinefinity's Kinemini 4k, and I shot it all raw for more flexibility in post. Taking lenses were all Russian, from 28 up to 135mm. The blog post has a cheat chart with all the data for each shot.
Can you tell when this or that lens is being used? Is there anything in particular that bugs you? Do you think this test makes the difference between 1.33x adapters easier to notice?
Lenses used were Century Optics WS-13, Panasonic LA7200, Isco 16:9 Video Attachment I, SLR Magic Anamorphot 1.33x-50, Century Optics 16:9 (the small one).
http://www.tferradans.com/blog/?p=8333
There's more info on the blog post above, but if you're feeling lazy, here's the video.
 

I shot a small narrative (I won't call it a "short") mixing all 1.33x anamorphic adapters with various taking lenses. The goal was to test out if all that talk of "this adapter is good, this one is bad", to see if we can actually notice the difference between lenses when there's a story being told. I included both well lit and low light shots to evaluate performance with different apertures. The camera used was Kinefinity's Kinemini 4k, and I shot it all raw for more flexibility in post. Taking lenses were all Russian, from 28 up to 135mm. The blog post has a cheat chart with all the data for each shot.
Can you tell when this or that lens is being used? Is there anything in particular that bugs you? Do you think this test makes the difference between 1.33x adapters easier to notice?
Lenses used were Century Optics WS-13, Panasonic LA7200, Isco 16:9 Video Attachment I, SLR Magic Anamorphot 1.33x-50, Century Optics 16:9 (the small one).
http://www.tferradans.com/blog/?p=8333
There's more info on the blog post above, but if you're feeling lazy, here's the video.
 

A little more about them here - http://www.tferradans.com/blog/?p=8462
I think it was a matter of insight (realizing that the focus solution didn't need to be associated with an anamorphic directly in a complete system, against the Isco patent) and time to develop.

Dang, your videos and articles are super helpful. I have been searching for a budget solution to single focus on my cheap anamorphic rig, and I find myself on your site/youtube channel finding answers. Thank you!