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Indeed it is, and indeed I do! Haven't turned it on in.. well.. some time. I must admit I find it funny that my first video-first camera was the XC10 but moved on because I wanted shallower DoF, and now I'm back to shooting deep DoF with a 10x zoom lens. This is why I never sell anything - I've lost count of the number of times I learn something new and then pull things out of the discard pile again, and although it's mostly lenses, you never really know.

Went hot-air ballooning and if there was ever a challenge for shooting, this was it. Extreme low-light and extreme DR from hugely bright light-sources. They say you can't take bags in the balloon, and it had been really wet weather, so I decided to go small. I took the GX85, TTartisans 17mm F1.4 for the low-light, Laowa 7.5mm F2 for an ultra-wide, and the 12-35mm F2.8. I was a bit cheeky and took a sling bag and kept it under my jacket. The requirement is that nothing is loose in the basket and that you can hold on with both hands for landing, so I figured my bag under my jacket was basically the same as having a big pocket. It's a crazy early start. We arrived in the field before first-light and they started setting up in pitch darkness guided only by torches. I started shooting at F1.7 and needed ISO6400 at first to get any kind of level on anything except their torches. I shot on the 17mm at F1.7 and gradually reduce the ISO until the balloon was mostly inflated, then swapped to the 7.5mm for a few wide shots, and then swapped to the 12-35mm F2.8 and it was time to get in the balloon and off we went. I also shot with my iPhone 12 mini for some quick shots using the ultra-wide when I didn't want to change lenses, and also as we were approaching landing, as I had put the camera away in anticipation. It was super-foggy and the pilot ended up having to land early and for a while we were going pretty close to the treetops so I'd put my camera away when he told us that he'd be landing at the next opportunity. Frame grabs.. mix of GX85 and iPhone, put through a quite moderate FLC pipeline. In retrospect I took the complete wrong equipment and used it in the wrong way (so, it's business as usual!) but the FLC pipeline really took the footage to the next level, and I used just enough strength on the film emulation to get rid of the digital look to the images. Here's a comparison. Grade (same as above): SOOC: The GX85 has super-whites so despite being SOOC that image is actually slightly clipped in-post and some highlights can be recovered, which the FLC grade has done, but you get the idea. The SOOC is with the GX85 default profile and has much more of a video look to it, despite being pretty good compared to other similar cameras. If I was to take the same equipment again, I'd lean into the darkness and just use the 17mm at F2.0 where it cleans up and use the GX85 at something sensible like ISO1600. This would have the early shots as perhaps being unusable, but it would mean that the torches the crew used wouldn't have been clipped (I clipped them in favour of exposing what they were shining on). We're going to go again later this year, and for that I plan to take the GH7, 9mm F1.7 and 14-140mm F3.5-5.6. This will be a much larger setup but if I use a neck strap then I only have to have one lens in a pocket and so I won't need a bag at all. I just bought the 9mm F1.7 and it's sharp wide-open, so apart from having AF, it is both an ultra-wide as well as a low-light lens. I can crop in-camera and/or in-post to get a tighter FOV, but you don't normally need long focal-lengths when it's that dark. The more I use this FLC pipeline the more I like it. If I'd have shown these images to my 2018 self, I wouldn't have believed me when I said that it was me that made them.

I have now imported my iPhone footage and put it through the same FLC pipeline as my GH7 footage. As you may recall, I shot the "home video" parts of the trip with my iPhone 12 Mini, and part of the goals of the new FLC pipeline is to be able to improve the iPhone footage and match it better with the GH7 footage. Overall, I am pleasantly surprised with both the images and the user experience. With my phone in my left-front pocket and GH7 in my right-hand, I could extend the pop-socket out, pull my phone out, shoot with it, then put it back, all with my left hand and not having to even turn off the GH7. Having the ability to swap from shooting with the GH7 and 14-140mm to an ultra-wide in seconds is great when you want to capture the action in real-time: It has surprisingly good handling of real-world DR: It allows for quick and unobtrusive shooting in restaurants and cafes: which also gives some background defocus which is nice. ...and it is great for shooting in very cramped or crowded situations: I struggled shooting in the Myongdong night-markets just because the GH7 was so conspicuous and just not well designed for such things, however the iPhone worked quite well for those chaos-and-people-everywhere shots, and was great for shooting situations at point-blank range: In retrospect I wish I had shot more whimsical footage with it throughout the trip, but that's a note for next time. In order to see how the FLC is contributing to these images, let's compare some of the above shots to how they would have looked with a simple CST workflow (I did a CST to DWG, matched exposure, then CST to 709-A). FLC: 709-A: FLC: 709-A: FLC: 709-A: I find that it takes the digititis out of the images quite a bit. Another thing it does is hide some of the limitations of the iPhone too. Here's a shot I took from out the train window. It's obviously a very low-light shot and the iPhone NR was probably set to "armageddon". 709-A: FLC (with a touch of sharpening): Anything in post that applies across all your shots will help to unify them, and so having a slight softening applied to all the footage, as well as similar colour treatment, can really help to smooth things around any rough shots. I created my own powergrade using FLC I called "50mm" because I took the grain and softening settings from the 35mm and 65mm presets and set things to the mid-point between the two, effectively emulating a 50mm film process. I have more work to do, including working out what settings give what results once the footage has gone through the YT compression, but it's a start.

One way to think about it is that if you put on the 14-140mm then you can just think of it like a camcorder, BUT (unlike a camcorder) you can swap to a different lens in those rare situations that come up from time to time. The 14-140mm with its seriously extended focal length at the long end, combined with the reasonable high-ISO performance of the GH7, means that it can do most things, but in those rare situations you're not stuck. Having an ultra-wide is really handy, especially for travel, and having a fast prime is really handy for low-light situations. Having a vintage lens can also be a fun addition too, when you want to go from having a normal look to having a dreamy or nostalgic look. In terms of shooting travel, I shot several different 'genres' on my last trip, and I actually found it to be quite straight-forward to do (I had wondered if it would just be too confusing / overwhelming but it didn't turn out to be). So you could easily swap between a few options for those different genres. I really feel like the GH7 + 14-140mm has all the advantages of a camcorder or an ENG or doco setup where I just use it and don't think about the camera almost at all while shooting, but then I can swap lenses when the need arises.

The 14-140mm allows you pretty much to shoot whatever compositions you can see. There were a few shots that required longer than 140mm, but by the time I add the in-camera zoom to get a 1:1 crop in C4K it's at 179mm, then stabilising in post makes it more, and then I can crop in post further, so that pretty much covers it. I only swapped to the 7.5mm lens once, which was an absolute PITA by comparison. In terms of the screen vs EVF, it's really a toss-up. The EVF can be more stable because it adds a third point-of-contact, but it really makes people aware you're shooting at them, even from far away, and it forces you to shoot from eye-level too. Shooting using the screen (tilted up) allows for shooting from chest-height, which I find much more pleasing for people shots, and is less noticeable too. The added complication is that the EVF can be adjusted so I don't need my reading glasses, and can read all the information on the screen. In practice I'm still figuring this out, but it created a few combinations that seemed to work. If it was bright out, I'd wear sunglasses, and shoot people from chest height just using the histogram and zebras to expose and peaking to confirm the AF was good. Then I'd use the EVF when I was zoomed in far away or shooting up at buildings etc which benefitted from the extra stabilisation. If it wasn't bright then I'd use the EVF for the same zoomed shots, and when I wanted to shoot people from chest height I'd put on my reading glasses and be able to see the screen just fine. If I quickly wanted a chest-height shot I could grab it without putting my reading glasses on first, as the AF and on-screen tools are so intuitive.

Thanks for the kind words @John Matthews and @ac6000cw .. I welcome the change of talking about the creative possibilities that the equipment affords us in using it, rather than just discussing it in theoretical terms. I'm now back home and starting to reflect on the trip, and one theme is that the more I use the 14-140mm the more I like it. For travel, where moving fast and having the flexibility are important it really shines. The length really seems to be an asset and I mentioned before that I ended up using the long end more than I thought I would, but let me expand a little on that. They say that painting is the art of addition, and photography is the art of subtraction. In painting, you have full control of the canvas and therefore getting nice frames is about starting with a blank canvas and deliberately adding the things you want it to contain. Whereas photography starts with the entire world, which for most purposes normally contains far too many things, which means either you physically remove those things from the composition you're photographing, or you change your location and focal length to exclude the items you don't wish to include. Obviously you can't just take a scene line the below, ask everyone to leave, remove all the signs on the buildings, remove the trees you don't like, etc, just to get a nice composition... So the answer is to find the elements you like, position yourself so that they are lined up, and then zoom in to get the composition you like most, like the below for example... I don't normally post shots of my travel companions because they're not keen on being posted on the open internet, but here's a good example shot of what a zoom is great for - seeing something and quickly capturing it. Yes, you can do this with primes, but very few people are going to travel with a 135mm MFT prime or 300mm FF lens, and even if they did they likely wouldn't be able to change to it fast enough to grab a composition like the below, and even if they could the likelihood that the FOV would end up containing all the right elements in the right proportions is very very low.. This also gives a small insight into for far behind my wife I will get while stopping to shoot this and that, so speed matters in the sense that she might walk so far ahead I might never find her again! I also find that in the edit the variety of focal lengths gives the footage an element of variation that I really like. For years I shot with a 35mm equivalent as my main lens, only swapping to other lenses when there was a good reason and time to do so, and I found that after a while I started to dislike the "one perspective" feeling the footage had. It's a valid creative choice, and if that's the feeling you want for your videos then that's great, but it's not the feeling I want on all my videos.

Some shots from a few days ago in Insadong. This area was very crowded and I did grab a range of normal shots at street-level, but the ones looking up were of particular interest to me due to the variety of architecture in the area. For reference, this is what most angles at street-level looked like: I have been recording a number of themes while out and about. The first are the 'normal' street scenes taken mostly at ground level. The second is views from the hotel window, which I posted earlier. The third is looking up. The tall buildings here (with its ~25M population in the metro area) are seemingly unending, in variety, size, and number. Some are deeply creative and stylish, some are featureless and faceless and nameless. A good subject to include if trying to capture a sense of the place. Here are a few shots looking up. Like all things here, it's about contrasts, and often the vegetation contrasts beautifully with the buildings so I've leaned into capturing compositions including both. These were all taken on the same day as the above shots.

My first priority was to make the images not look like cheap digital, which I am confident I've achieved with my current workflow. The images I'm getting sure look like film to me, especially seeing how it reacts when dialling the Exposure up and down within the plugin. I think I have more work to do in learning to control the high DR shots, but that's something for when I am back at home and have time to experiment with different techniques. I am still contemplating modifying my custom DCTL that works in L*a*b space to be the front-end that I will use to grade underneath the overall film look. Once I've gotten a handle on the files and how to control them, then I was going to go back to the BMMCC images I took on my last visit here and then try to match the GH7 images to those BMMCC ones. The light here is a bit different to at home, so having footage from the same place to compare is very useful. I feel like up until now I've been struggling with footage that wasn't up to the (very difficult) conditions I shoot in, and now I have equipment that is giving me files that I can make into whatever I like, so the question then becomes what I want them to look like, which is a whole other journey.

I would suggest that it has enough DR, as would most current high-end cameras. Have you done any tests to work out how much DR you're actually dealing with? I'd suggest it's less than you'd think. It's trendy to complain about how cameras don't have enough DR and to continually call for more, and I have done this in the past as well, however I did it because I actually shoot scenes on a regular basis (backlit sunsets) and I was able to work out how much DR this required in real life (the BMPCC / BMMCC could just do it and the GH5 fell short) so I knew I needed around 11 stops. I would suggest that interview situations, even naturally lit, wouldn't require as much as literally having the sun in the frame, but it's very easy to run a test and find out. I did a latitude test on the GH7 in V-Log Prores and whatever wasn't clipped kept full quality, so with proper colour management was basically perfect.

No, I just shoot travel stuff, so not really the same thing, but having said that it would crush it if you gave it controlled lighting and a fast sharp prime. Shooting in these high DR scenes with available lighting is a torture test compared to an interview where you're rolling out the red carpet and making everything the easiest it could possibly be for the camera. You feeling tempted?

Raining in Seoul today, so pushed the GH7 + 14-140mm combo to its limits, including the in-camera digital zoom to get to 179mm, equivalent to 358mm on FF!! Don't judge the lens by these images, apart from having a film emulation applied, I was also shooting through two layers of hotel glass on a range of angles, and the rain and dirt on the outside of the glass wouldn't have helped either. My normal thoughts when shooting through dirty glass is to have the fastest lens possible to blur it all into oblivion, but the DOF calculator says that a 50mm F1.2 lens focused at 100m will have 41.6m in focus in front of the focal plane, but the 140mm F5.6 lens also focused at 100m will only have 30.2m in focus in front of the focal plane, so the 140mm will blur the raindrops on the glass more, presumably because of the longer focal length. Win! This is the situation I had in mind when buying the 14-140mm lens, although obviously I knew I would use it for other things too. I must admit that I've been using the long end while out and about much more than I thought I would, so not regretting the purchase at all.

Maybe gothic weddings is the way to go? OMG, of course it is. This travelling stuff will rot your brain I tell ya! But better to refer to Perfect Days than to Train To Busan - I'm not interested in a holiday THAT exciting. But talking about contrast ratios, yes, the frame grabs were for reference of how dark they print finished films and how much contrast they tend to have in the finished print. The files from the GH7 are incredible, and certainly the best I've ever owned, so dealing with these challenges is new to me. Previously I would have files clipped in-camera and the shots would just be binned, or they'd be super contrasty and without proper colour management I'd be struggling to make them look natural and without radical colour casts etc, so this is a very welcome development! I wouldn't mind holidaying in overcast conditions actually - where do I apply to get one of those remotes that changes the weather?

Visited Jikjisa Temple yesterday, which was founded in the year 418, and looks straight out of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Everywhere you turn there are compositions that make you gasp. The main challenge with full sun like this is the high contrast scenes, and then grading them so they don't look faded and also don't have half the image almost while or half of it pitch black. This one has slightly more contrast than I'm happy with, but it gives you a sense of the look things start to drift into. When I'm grading them for real, I think I'll likely use large power-windows and pull things down or up using those. As a reference, here's the kind of shot I'm talking about where the contrast ratios are just overwhelming. The information is all in the files, so I'm capturing it all, I just have to pull it out.

Thanks! I've literally used the same saved powergrade for each set, adjusting it a little perhaps but not by much. I think I backed off the halation on that set, but I can't remember making any other change. They do look nicer though, so maybe it's just the exposure levels, or maybe it's just the subject matter? Sunset and blue hour always has a certain magic to it.

Just had a look at some stills from it, and yes, much darker than my other references. I looked through all the John Wick franchise, as well as some other action series too, and one way they can make these things all look dark is just have them all set in night-exteriors or interiors without visible daylight. I think there's lots of tricks like this. For example, I read an article on how movies often look "larger than life" which has many factors, but one was that there were almost three times the number of shots that were taken below eye-level as those at or above eye-level, so most of the movie was literally looking up at the characters.

Last nights adventures. This time I graded with MBP monitor set to middle brightness and referred to some references. I swapped from the 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 + vND combo to the 12-35mm f2.8 lens without vND once the sun went down, as it's easier to shoot with the constant aperture when zooming. The stalls and restaurant areas were too bright for F2.8 and base ISO 500, so had to stop down on some shots. The massive lanterns in the parade were also a challenge too, bring so much brighter than the ambient levels, and I didn't want to smash them into the highlight rolloff of the emulation. I tried walking with it at 12mm but it was IBIS-wobbles galore, so next time when walking I'll probably use my iPhone. I compared my iPhone 12 mini cameras to my GH5 and the normal iPhone camera was equivalent ISO noise to GH5 with F2.8 and the iPhone wide was equivalent to GH5 at F8. @MrSMW can tell me if these are still too dark 🙂 I based the FLC grade on the 35mm preset, but I'm thinking that it's a bit too low-end, and the 64mm preset is a bit clean, so I might create my own 50mm preset for something in between.

Edited and uploaded the stabilisation test video. Test of how well the GH7 and 14-140mm combination is able to stabilise hand-held footage. GH7 was using the Boost IS mode, which is a more stable version of IBIS (but it doesn't do electronic IS, that's a different mode, so this mode has no crop). My hands were more shaky than normal when filming this, and the first shot was standing up without leaning on anything, and the second shot of the hotel was sitting down. Results aren't perfect, but they're good enough for my purposes.

I don't mind at all, I mentioned it partly to raise the topic as I'm not sure about it. What I need to do is to get a bunch of references and study how they distribute the DR of the images into the final grade, so I can get a sense of things. A bit like how cinematographers get an understanding of levels and ratios, using false colour or a light meter. I pulled a few reference stills from the movie Perfect Days which is set in Seoul to compare: and some from Kill Bill vol 2, as it's a bit more contrasty: and The Matrix, because it's got that feeling of the matrix not being a real place, which gets to the idea that Seoul is like a world unto itself: or The Killer has quite a dark grade to things: There's something about the rich dark areas, and having rich dark colours that I'm chasing, but obviously I'm yet to work out what it is and how to get it. Works in progress though!

A few more from today, in Hongdae. Even less grading than yesterday, but trying to lean into the contrast and deep shadows more.

First day out shooting in Seoul. Here are some images. These are all frame-grabs, were ETTR, had a look put over them with Resolve FLC plugin, and I adjusted exposure on each (and contrast on the odd one or two) and that's it. I'm sure I will finesse them once I start editing for real, but this is essentially just looking at my dailies. Setup is incredibly easy to use thanks to the huge DR, AF is super-snappy, the 14-140mm zoom gives so much flexibility and I'm finding I'm using the long end a lot more than I thought I would. I'll post some video footage of it later, but I'm also finding that I can hand-hold at 140mm (280mm FF equivalent) and with the OIS + IBIS working together get almost no movement in the frame at all, and with a slight crop in post I'd get locked-off images. At anything below 80mm or 100mm the frame is locked and won't need any stabilisation in post. Incredible results.

Yeah, every time I think about how you might be composing for both horizontal and vertical I just imagine you turn into Wes Anderson and frame everything centred. There are probably other ways to go about it, but I'm glad it's not something I have to work through!

In all seriousness though, now that everything is devices and standards don't matter anymore, it's worth taking a few images and cropping them to different aspect ratios and seeing how the images feel. I've become very fond of 2:1 lately. Wider than 16:9 or 17:9, but not so wide that normal-sized screens force the subjects in the frame to be too small, as can happen with 2:35:1

The only video one needs on aspect ratios:

You'd be mad not to wait for the 17K version. I mean, is 12K enough? Really?

The low-contrast look has been fashionable for a long time, since people started shooting in LOG and then editing in it and getting used to how it looks. Colourists talk about this problem like it's been around for many years and simply never went away. This caused a feedback loop where directors fought the colourist to keep things bland, which made films get released with bland grades, and then this became the reference for future directors and also all the amateurs. Also, it's quite hard to add contrast in post because it requires a clarity of thinking that many do not possess. When you look at your image and see it's captured all this information in the shadows and highlights and then apply a healthy level of contrast you immediately miss the details that are now crushed in the rolloffs. This leads to the question of what parts of the scene can be obscured. The only way to be able to answer this question is to understand what the shot is about, and therefore what is relevant. This is a level of maturity not yet attained by many. I didn't really do a systematic comparison with the G9ii, but in general terms, why would I pay several thousand dollars for a new camera that isn't the leading offering, when the flagship is only a few hundred more? Certainly, if internal Prores and cooling fans were absent on the G9ii then either of those would probably have been an instant disqualification. The size comparison is pretty moot as well, for street work I'd consider both to be full-sized bodies.