Phil A

I love shooting film, it's just the whole part between shooting it and having the result that annoys me. Personally, I would only advice someone to shoot film if he actually develops himself or is willing to go to a small, good (usually expensive) lab. I have permanently changing assortments of analog cameras because I enjoy shooting film. I am/was shooting Canon EOS 3, Mamya 645 1000s, Rolleiflex 3.5f and Kodak Retina IIC. I like how film looks and I wish there was an easy way to have digital pictures look exactly as smooth and organic without tinkering 1h in Photoshop to get 90% there. But it has mainly to do with the lens and what film stock you use. When I shoot the EOS 3 (I have 2 of them so I can shoot different films in parallel, e.g. B/W+Color or ASA100 + ASA800) it has nothing to do with "slowing down, getting into the details" and what people like to use as a mantra for analog photography. It's just like shooting a EOS 5D but without chimping, especially when shooting e.g. Kodak Portra 400. With the Rolleiflex/Mamiya everything is slow and deliberate but it's also sometimes annoying because when you didn't shoot with a waist level finder for a while your brain will forget that what you see is mirrored so composing the picture takes forever. In general I like both types of analog shooting. What I hate, hate, hate about film photography comes now after shooting. I don't develop myself so where do you give the film? If I give it to the drugstore for C41 development it's cheap but the quality is hit or miss. They've scratched multiple films before, one got completely lost and once I had fingerprints on the negatives. At our local drugstore it's mandatory to either get a CD with scans (oversharpened, oversatured, 1 Megapixel) or prints (so you take the cheapest and throw them away) but that may have changed. So that's what I typically do. Alternatively I can give it to a specialist lab here for enthusiast hobbyists but they will charge enthusiast prices (10$ per roll 135/120 film for standard C41 development). And what do you do then with the negatives? I digitalize by photographing them with a macro lens and a DSLR/mirrorless camera. As was mentioned before, a good scanner is super expensive and a lot of tinkering to get perfect results with. Ideally you get it done professionally, but the good lab mentioned before will charge between 5 and 15 $ for a single scanned frame in high resolution with basic scratch/dust removal, depending on the format (1-5$ low res). So buying + developing a roll 120 Tri-X for example shot through a 6x6 camera plus the cheaper scans will cost you for the 12 pictures a total of 85 $. That's not worth it to me to be honest because either I get good quality and it's expensive or I have to do everything myself which is just time I can't always spare in parallel to my career and other hobbies. So for me usually back to digital it is after shooting 1 or 2 rolls a year (chances are you'd anyway want to post-process the scanned negatives). To echo some others, I would absolutely not sink Hasselblad/Leica kind of money into an analog camera before not evaluating for 6 to 12 months how much someone likes shooting analog with all that belongs to it. I feel like it gets romanticized way too much nowadays. A lot of people how grew up or lived shooting analog are more than happy to leave it in the past. /rant over

At least here in Switzerland, the price is part of the problem. The A7 III is on sale for 1849 CHF while the S1 is 2999. That’s not a good basis in combination with the fact that the Sony eco system is a lot better developed.

Well I live partially in Germany and partially in Switzerland and electronics are quite a bit cheaper in the latter (in contrast to literally everything else you could buy). Stores I have personally good experiences with in Germany but which aren’t necessarily the cheapest are the following. Camera TelTec.de Marcotec-shop.de Foto-Mundus.de Computer Alternate.de and then there’s of course Amazon for literally anything you could need.

So I read it right that it’s impossible to use a field monitor with it?

I keep looking for the Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera all the time because it's clearly a bit better than the BMPCC for my needs but I have never seen it below 750€ used here in Germany and that's just not what I'm looking to part with. Also, and this probably sounds dumb, I am not sure I could ever go to a camera without IBIS again after the GH5. The fact that you can handhold static shots so well massively changed how much I actually use a tripod for casual stuff. That's also the single one grain of salt making me hesitant about the BMPCC4k.

Probably an odd question because I‘m coming the other way around than most people: What are my camera choices for the Voigtländer 35mm f/1.4 or 40mm f/1.4 Nokton? I realize that I can use them natively on a M-mount camera or via adapter on every mirrorless system but I obviously want their intended FoV and characteristic and, as there’s no focal reducer for M-mount, that rules out the Leica M8, Fujifilm X and mFT cameras. I want a really basic, compact camera just to take portraits and still life pictures. Does someone know how bad these lenses perform on the original A7 or A7r due to the micro lens design? I find the M9 to still be really pricey and I don’t feel rangefinder focusing works well when relying on glasses (I’m short sighted so I can use EVF without glasses).

The MD flange distance is shorter than EF unfortunately.

Because I travel a lot, I have a Feisol tripod with a HDV701 head... and can safely say, it's rather trash. You'll just not get great pans/tilts with cheap and/or light grip gear, even more so when you go in a diagonal movement. I feel like traveling and grip gear collide massively in the logistic aspect. So I'm one of the people who just shoot locked off for the majority of stuff (which is my personal preference anyway) and bring a solid ball head instead of a fluid head. Everything that needs movement/tracking is handheld either with a gimbal or rig. That said, I got to finger around a Sachtler Ace and that was really nice. I wouldn't want to travel with it though.

If you check on the left in your edit timeline, you can set for each track of video / audio if they will automatically move up when you delete something. I always directly deactivate that, I don't understand why it's on per default because I can't even count anymore how often I accidentally deleted video when I just wanted to delete the audio, etc.

So was the big, original Blackmagic Ursa and that went the way of the dodo with no new sensor ever.

I know the forum is mainly driven by lusting after gear and pixel peeping but if you should ever have the time and motivation, I would love to see a "behind the scenes" thread from you where you tell more about your process (without hijacking this one). Planning, shooting, post. I think your videos are some of the best I've ever seen by a participant of this forum.

I always, on every system, shot macro with manual focus so I would get a lens that has good manual focus and adapt, i would totally not get anything with focus-by-wire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_1_series It's not their first though, I don't understand why people keep saying that. Nikon was quite early with the 1 series, it's just that they developed completely independent of what customers wanted and the product kinda bombed.

Great. I think the rendering, etc. is good and I like both the quality and quantity of bokeh when shooting wide open, where the lens is already sharp enough for my taste. Auto focus for photography is working well and together with Eye-AF leads to being able to let someone else take a picture (there's not a single good picture of myself taken with the Voigtländer because manual focus basically overburdens most people who aren't used to it). On the downside, you might have to adjust the focal reducer to get sharp pictures at infinity (and then still not get them if you get a slightly out of spec one) and it's not ideal for manual focus because often the combination of lens to adapter to camera has some rotational play when turning the focus ring (you can limit this by mounting the focal reducer to your cage and/or using a lens support on rails). Continuous auto focus on the GH5 is basically unusable with the combination but I found it also too unreliable with native Panasonic lenses. I'm taking quite a bit more pictures than video so that was a good decision for myself in my opinion.

I've sold my Voigtländer 17.5mm for a combination of SpeedBooster + Sigma 30mm f/1.4 (EF mount). Missed the auto focus too much.

Clearly 40mm and then something 70-85mm as a complimentary second. I also kinda like 50mm but in actual use there are too many situations where it's just a bit too tight.

So we're now publicly shaming people and companies because the host of one of our favorite internet forums didn't get invited to a camera test event that he had no natural entitlement to be at (besides it being a good publicity opportunity for BMD)? While I can understand the disappointment of Andrew, I think the behavior displayed here will probably reduce future chances regarding any brands' involvements even more. Not exactly professional at all. Why is this forum always so god damn hostile?! I can't judge if John Brawley is a nice person or not because I don't know him, but I found it rather surprising he was even willing to fight it out with some of us arm chair experts. People here compare his behavior to how Roger Deakins behaves on his forum. Well, I have never seen the people on Deakins' forum question what he says all the time so I think it is not too surprising that eventually there might be rash answers. I find this really disappointing all in all. This is a forum I really enjoy(ed) to read a lot but the tone is often so negative, aggressive and absolute. I already took some time off the forum a while ago and now I often starting writing posts/replies but then stop and decide not to post at all because the internet tough guy behavior here. Like in all controversial threads, I guess it's again only a question of time for people who disagree to get banned?

Do you photograph for huge fine art prints? Do you shoot sports in low light? If the answers are "no" then any current camera will do. Unless you permanently shoot at ISO 6400 or need FullFrame f/1.4 shallow DoF, I don't see how the GH5 could hold you back. It's clearly a more pleasant experience than shooting my A6300 was. And the 5D III isn't exactly amazing for post-processing either.

But would you want to color grade on a 21" TN panel that was run 8h for 5days a week for 3 years? Also +1 to transcoding. I have a system with way better performance than what you're looking at and I still transcode all my H.264 stuff to ProRes because it's just less sucky for editing. A regular SSD or maybe 3 or 4 spinning drives in Raid0 are perfectly fine for even ProRes HQ in UHD 60p.

That Samyang 24mm 1.4 is clearly not representative of what the lens is supposed to look like wide open. For reference, just look at some pics on Flickr. Exchange it and the next one is probably a lot better. Quality for money, the Sigma 24mm 1.4 is amazing. In general I think the Sigma Art lenses are always a solid option, especially when adapting to mirrorless (no such thing as auto focus adjustment like in DSLR).

Considering that these are all mainly photography cameras and photographers like ecosystems and lens choice and stuff, we have to say: NX1 -> the first really good Samsung NX camera, but lens choice limited. Basically the 16-50, 50-150 and 85mm were the only pro lenses. Leica SL -> Leica. It's silly expensive for what it is/does. It's just not a mass market product. Barely native lens choices. Fuji X-H1 -> Exact copy of the X-T2 with IBIS and better ergonomics. Price difference and timing issues therefore... you also get exactly the same picture quality with the smaller models (X-E3, X-T20).

How is everyone editing his GH5 files, explicitly asking about the (in my case V-LOG L) 24fps 10bit UHD files? I'm using the regular Davinci Resolve so I can't edit the files natively. Therefore I use Rocky Mountain Movie Converter (which was the go-to with the h.265 files of the NX1) to transcode my footage to ProRes 422 HQ which I then edit and grade. I once read that this is a sub-ideal transcode but struggle to find other ways to easily(free/cheap) transcode, seeing how I have no access to Adobe Media Encoder CC due to lack of interest to buy into the Adobe CC subsciptions for video just to transcode files. Now with this workflow I have the Pro that it edits edits smoothly with the Cons of over 700 Mbit/s files needing a lot of storage while likely having quality loss due to lossy compression of an already lossy codec. I'm wondering what's the best course of action in your opinion? Keep the current workflow and maybe use a different transcoder Easy performance for my system but needs a lot of disk space and questions of generational quality loss Buy Davinci Resolve Studio to natively edit the 150 Mbit/s IPB files without transcoding Uses very little disk space but probably going to kill my system on the CPU level for the decoding when scrubbing/playing Buy Davinci Resolve Studio to natively edit the 400 Mbit/s All-I files without transcoding Uses more SD space (and buy new V60 cards) when recording, but less disk space than ProRes and probably acceptable system performance For the final results (on the internet) I have to question if the quality differences might even be noticeable but I'm a hobbyist so it's as much about enjoying the process. PS: Main system is an oc'ed i7 5930K with 32 GB RAM and oc'ed AMD R9 390. System, apps and all media on multiple Samsung 850 drives. Secondary desire to edit very basic stuff on my laptop with i7 6700HQ, 16 GB RAM and GeForce GTX960M.

@FoxAdriano The screen has lower resolution than the EVF, better get the G-Cup from Guerilla https://www.guerrillaproducts.com/products/g-cup-panasonic-gh5

As we're discussing travel videos, I'm curious about your feelings about duration. I think that the "parties involved" tend to go towards too much length due to having an emotional connection while an un-involved viewer might be better served with a short clip of only 1 or maybe maximum 2 minutes? Maybe split a longer clip up into multiple shorter ones with a specific theme? Obviously if it is to be posted via Social Media, attention span of most viewers is more like 10 to 30 seconds.

I just wish the sun hood was a) better designed/engineered b) less expensive c) both of the above Besides that the monitor is a pure pleasure.