kaylee

"Seen these - but what exactly are these cheap chinese helicoid things? I guess to mount the lens, because the Diaplan is a projector lens indeed".
Helicoid is the focusing ring and supplies a rear mount to adapt to camera. I've converted many projector lenses this way, cheap way to achieve results similar or identical with projector lenses vs the much more expensive photographic versions. 99% of the time the projector lenses have no aperture, but if it's all about the bokeh and shallow DOF...it is not always a downside. Helios 40-2 is a great lens, but if you wanted soap bubble bokeh as close as possible to your example image, The Meyer Diaplan 100mm f/2.8 or Pentacon AV 100mm f/2.8 projector lens would probably be as close as you would get - sub 100 quid.
If aperture-less  lenses don't scare you too much, a 'cheaper' alternative to the Helios 40-2 is the Cyclop H3T-1 version. Was made to fit soviet night intensifier scopes. I have one remounted to an M65 Helicoid and it is one of my favourite lenses by far. Crazy bokeh with oval aperture installed to give faux anamorphic look, fixed oval aperture shape effectively stops the lens down slightly on horizontal axis to improve sharpness and eliminate colour fringing that is present wide open on this model, and the regular Helios 40-2.
Oh man, I'm currently on the lookout for Orestor 100mm f2.8 (15 blade zebra version) - can you recommend it as good taking lens for morphic? What the flares/ coating like...decent for complimenting iscomorphot/Kowa B&H golden flare?
Already own the 135mm, which is lovely, but a bit too long for morphic rigging sometimes.

I've seen a steady interest in the 'soap bubble effect' growing on the vintage lens forums and on Flickr.  The regular suggestions I see to get this effect is a triplet design, and meyer seems to be mentioned before any other.  Leading to crazy prices being paid for rather poor lenses.  it should be considered that the effect is usually a result of the shooting techinque rather than the lens itself.  most of the subjects seem to be macro shots of bugs or toadstools with a dynamic background just after it has rained.  for example, the picture above wouldn't exhibit the bubble effect if the bug wasn;t infront of water.   I think even if someone were to buy the gold standard meyer bubble lens, they'd still only see this effect when shooting with lots of extension tubes at very high magnification.    
 
just about any medium tele lens from the 1960's will give this effect.  you want old lenses with coatings with little to no apparent colour to them.  my personal favourite for this effect is a late 1950's zeiss jena biotar 58mm - coatings are almost non existent so light source bokeh has a glow.

All the Meyer-Optik lenses produce great round/soap bokeh - the Troplan is the king.
Its a bit like the Helios 40-2 is the king of swirly bokeh for the Russain lenses, but the Helios 44-2 also produces swirly bokeh.
I got some really good soapy Bokeh from the Lydith 30mm f3.5 recently & the Orestor 100mm f2.8 is an amazing lens - the 135mm Orestor is known as the Bokeh Monster!

Nice! I saw the next samples on http://www.rugift.com/helios-40-2-85mm-f15-lens-nikon-new-design.htm . Looks pretty epic.


But it's quite a specialty lens which you can't just go and use on everything and it's not exactly priced like some of the other vintage roughly similar character ones that perhaps are in the sub-100 bucks range. So I haven't pulled the trigger yet myself.
You can also try to find an Orestor f/2.8 100 or 135mm.

Hello!
I've got a project where the aesthetic of "soap bubble bokeh" is the way to go.
I'm very, very aware of the Trioplan 100mm and it's sharp rise in value. At this moment in time, I can't justify buying one of these on eBay for a single project (even though i want one for keeps).
Does anybody recommend a more "budget" alternative? 
 

hi kaylee, i watched it thru the Vimeo app on an Apple TV. so it was playing in 1080p. 
and yeah, just referring to light, filtration, lenses, production design, post color, etc. meaning, what a camera is capable of shines in the right hands and looks like mud in the hand of another.  here's a sample frame from Friends With Kids...


everyone who has released URSA Mini 4.6K footage has been in a race to be amongst the first crop of footage out there, which is why each of them has had the same caveat: don't judge by the grade. 

so sharp. maybe too sharp. on my 4k television, the rocks on the beach almost appear to vibrate.
I bet the URSA Mini 4.6k would look great with vintage glass. whenever I see a camera that looks a little too much like video, I try to remind myself that both Drive and Friends with Kids were shot with the same camera in the same year and one looks like a proper movie while the other nearly looks like a sit-com.

So, this came up in another thread I was just in, and I see it mentioned here and there on the forum, but I think it deserves its own topic so I'm starting one.
I recently became very interested in recording externally to an Atomos or similar from my Sony bodies in an attempt to break the 30min limit. Seemed like a no brainer, especially with the current ridiculous falling price of Ninja units. But before I jump in, I wanted to read up on the workflow so I'd know what to prepare for. Until now, I was unaware of what the Skin Smoothing setting in the camera did (honestly, what self respecting photog or videog would have that enabled in the first place anyway), but now I'm suddenly VERY aware of it. 

Apparently (and I'm just going by what I see online in my research), there is some sort of bug in the firmware of many of the BIONZ X based cameras, that turns this blasted smoothing feature on when recording video even if you disabled it in the menu. If you aren't aware of this bug, this guy's video pretty much nails it in demonstration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6GVm1Ke2dQ
Since I didn't hear many people being scared off by this, I figured you can't go by one guy on the internet's opinion of a perceived problem. 
But then I found it again mentioned in Phillip Bloom's blog regarding using the A7S with a Shogun here:
http://philipbloom.net/blog/dad/ (about half way down the page)

And here it is again by Dave Dugdale:
http://www.learningvideo.com/atomos-shogun-review/ (third paragraph)

Then some guy in a forum shared this video to demonstrate how well the atomos was working with his A5100:
https://youtu.be/-DmrpLji6gk
He apparently wasn't even aware of the waxy skin thing going on with her face, but I see it right away now that i'm aware of it!

It seems that this issue is a legit one. While I've read that a firmware update to the RX series has solved it on that camera, the rest of us trying to record off our A6000, A5100, A7S, etc have this blasted thing show up whenever a face can be recognized. The "solution" has been to turn off face recognition and press record in camera. Without recording in camera, the hdmi out defaults to smoothing on again. I'm wondering, how many people do this and just haven't noticed it happens? Now that I've seen it and will be looking for it, I'm afraid it will drive me bonkers. OR do people just hit record in the camera to disable it?

My real question is, what about those of us who want to do this simply because we want to record longer durations than the internal recording allows? What happens when my A7S reaches 30 min and stops recording internally? Does everyone's face suddenly go all waxy? And what about trying to use external recording to prevent overheating on the smaller A5100? Hitting record on the camera isn't an option because it will build up heat too fast to even make it to 30 minutes most of the time. Is there another solution I'm not aware of? 

It's a text book illustration of excessive profit chasing will result in the death of your brand.
 
I used to associate Hasselblad with medium format image quality and $45,000 cameras.
 
Now I associate them with rebadging old Sony cameras which you can pick up for $400 on eBay.
 
The design and finish of the Lunar isn't even nice. The RX100 mod is even more lazy, practically the only change is the grip.
 
Hasselblad are toast. DSLRs like the 36MP D800 are now good enough to replace medium format and digital backs. The company was bought out by a venture capitalist firm recently who were asked to look at ways of leveraging the brand for more profit and the disastrous Sony rebadges are a direct result of that.
 
Under current management practices (which aren't sustainable) and non-engineering lead product launches, let's see how long they last for. Want to take bets? 2 years?

I love it. Simple as that. Will have footage soon.

Well it will be for sale soon
Had a quick play with it. Please excuse the vignette (I have never used one before) and the darkness. Also I didn't even clean it and the lenses was covered in dust. 
This was just a quick proof of concept. Both are ungraded at iso 4000.
For a 1" @ f5.6 it looks pretty shallow imo.

So I read the article on NFS today about a 35mm adapter on the XC10. Thought it could be a fun experiment and went to see one that was listed for $100 with some lenses included.
Knowing my fellow swedes I knew there was a good chanse there was going to be gems in the case. And I was right.
Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35mm f2.4
Carl Zeiss Jena 135mm f3.5
Voigtlander Color-Ultron 50mm f1.8
Super-Takumar 55mm f1.8
Jupiter 85mm f2
Chinon 28mm f2.8
Lowest total cost on ebay (recently SOLD not asking prices): $640
So I will be selling them, make a profit and keep the adapter and use it for fun with my Nikon lenses on various cameras.

Nice pics!
I will add a couple more recent pick ups to give the thread a bigger start.
The lovley 85mm Ive wanted for a long time.

Film for the Canon (prepaid process/scan)

Macro for the D750

Camera for Gunpowder

We've been doing this on another forum. It's fun too see what others are getting.
My own latest gear would include... the Olympus 75mm f/1.8.


Then there's the Z Camera E1 by ImagineVision Tech as well as the Zhongyi/ZY Optics 25mm f/0.95
And of course, I'm not all about new gear, I do love me some vintage gems as well... so these are the ones that came in last month:


Now I kinda have become obsessed with 'red lettered lenses'. Of course we know the Zeiss lenses with red 'T', but there's also red 'V' (Meyer Optik Görlitz) and red 'P' (Russian 'P') lenses.
Also got in this Tokina, but it was sold as 'new - without issues' but came in looking like this (am working this out with the seller):

right now i use Paper app and a stylus. I'm a Cubs fan!

I've no experience with a stylus, but the era of the Mouse is dead for me. I've been using the Magic Trackpad for over a year now & it has revolutionised the way I can communicate with my computer - its fully customisable.
But a stylus would be a really useful addition thing to have for editing, so you could properly isolate a particular object in order to use a mask more accurately etc... Obviously, they already exist (Intious 5 etc...), but in conjunction with a touch screen, such as an ipad, that you could link to your computer properly would be amazing.
I'm stuck in a Mac rut & I really hope that Apple will see the future sooner rather than later - I really would like to see a properly spec'd Mac Mini server model interacting with a larger screened iPad. Its a real shame when you can see the future & the companies just want to hold you back. It's like fast, cheap Broadband in the UK - they could do it without ripping people off, but the monopoly of companies won't allow it!
 

I think it's interesting. I use my iPad for 3 things: storyboarding, watching movies, and a sound machine (overnight).

I've bought the original Surface Pro and the Surface Pro 3, and I have sold both of them. I've love the idea of working with images on a tablet via a stylus, but as of right now, the software isn't there yet. Neither Lightroom nor Photoshop worked very well with a stylus, because the UI wasn't anywhere near usable. Lightroom was getting there with the touch UI for Windows machines with a touch screen, but it wasn't very intuitive, and the Surface Pro 3 wasn't quite fast enough to handle 24 and 36 megapixel files -- the machine would stutter and lag, and that just exacerbated the problems.
I was really, really interested in the Surface Book, until I found out the price. I'm super super keen to try the iPad Pro with the Astropad app -- I think that might be the best bet yet for what we both seem to want to do. Ultimately what I really want -- and reading all the reviews, what all the reviewers want too -- is pro apps on the iPad Pro. I also want to be able to plug in a hard drive into the damn thing to copy files into the iPad as quickly as possible!

this is a v cool idea for a thread i like this

I use an Intious 5 for video editing. Once I got used to it, a mouse is just a pain.

On lots of forums its popular with a "Picture of your latest purchase" thread. And since this is a forum filled with gear junkies and G.A.S, I thought it could be fun to have one for photo/video related stuff.
IMO its enjoyable and gives a glimpse into others lives.
The point is to show a picture with or without comments on why, price etc. Not a product picture, it should be taken by you of the actual unit.
Its not a thread for debate or questioning why people bought what they did.
I can start and we will see if it sticks.

$25 and fully automatic. Even AF.

I'm loving the S II and the R II, going to get rid of the RX10 II because of obvious reasons (low light performance, sensor size). What I liked about it so much was the real easy run'n'gun option, but the new Alphas just do that with a much nicer image and package. The IBIS isn't really usable for video once you go above 135 mm, but up to that it's quite alright if you have a bit of practice with it. The S obviously is much better in low light and in my opinion in a few other scenarios, as well, but the R is at least decent all the time. There's a few downsides of course, the poor build quality of the display (really don't understand what they were thinking here, the cameras being so expensive). The Slo-Mo on the S is superb, even better than the RX10 II imho, if only for the full frame look. And you just can't produce bad video indoors with bad lighting with the S, much unlike the RX.
Lens-wise: the 90 macro is quite awesome, especially for video, with the added stabilization and the best ergonomics I've ever got to enjoy on a lens (you can switch between AF and MF just by clicking the focus ring up and down, plus you have a button to suspend AF while pushing it), also for close-ups it really does the trick, obviously. Image quality is flawless, too. The 55 1.8 is great as well, very light and small for the occasional ninja shot.
In terms of Auto Focus in video, the R is quite a bit better, but both aren't too reliable, especially in low light (here, the S is much better with native lenses as has been said before). All in all still quite alright, though.
I'm finally getting rid of my D800 and NX1, too, Sony all in, even though I don't like their philosophy, the cameras just pack so much punch. Stills of the R are so amazing and you can do pretty much everything handheld, the silent shooting is nice, too for certain situations (if you mind the shutter speed and other limitations).

Would be quite funny if the NX1 is discontinued, then a hack makes it the dream camera... They will be like gold dust.

Hey all,
Just shot/edited my first piece. I'm coming from a radio producer/documentarian background and have produced some stuff for television, but this is the first thing I've shot and edited myself.
It was done strictly as a learning exercise. I've dabbling in video in my spare time (which has been scarce and so painstakingly slow) for about 5 years now and have learned a lot on these boards. I definitely appreciate the information and experiences shared here and would greatly appreciate any constructive criticisms and advice.
Password: Malvern
I did basic color correction as I'm just beginning to learn how to grade, and honestly thought it looked decent until it got uploaded to vimeo. So any vimeo tips would be appreciated as well. 
Here's a run down of the stuff I used:
Camera: 5D MKII (ML Raw)
Lens: Canon 28mm F/2.8, Canon 100mm F/2.8 L, Canon 80-200mm F/2.8 L
Audio: Sennheiser G3, Marantz PMD661
Lights: F&V R-300, Lowel Rifa Ex-88
Conversion: MLVMystic
Edit/Basic Color Correction: Da Vinci Resolve 11 Lite
Export: ProRes 422 HQ (resized to HD 1920x1080) 
Password: Malvern
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/145473746" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href="https://vimeo.com/145473746">People I Know - Kevin Jones (No Grade)</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/tyharper">Ty Harper</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>