kye

59 minutes ago, maxJ4380 said:

Too late. there's a f2 35mm takumar on its way, i may also get a warming filter for  the double whammy or more likely just for comparisons 

Lens should be here by the end of the month.  It kinda rounds out my takumer set, i have most of the focal lengths i think although none are matching, there's taks, super taks, and smc's. i don't think i have a 28mm and definitely no eight element either. Next item will be a speed booster i think, to claw back some of that crop and i presume it gives me  an additional focal length for each lens. Well thats how i'm looking at it anyway.

I have a M42-M43 speed booster and recommend getting one.  It makes the focal lengths more useful and for any given FOV gives you the ability to get shallower DoF or if you stop down to keep the same DoF the lenses sharpen up a bit.

Depending on what your preferences are in image and rendering, there are lots of other M42 lenses around too.

Actually, I screwed up the last image, so here's a replacement:

and here's the revised node graph:

 

I've also started looking at things in post.

First was to look at the grain section of the Film Look Creator, which softens the image as well as adds grain (because that's how film works!).  I tried it on a few images and was actually surprised at how subtle the effects were, especially compared to how strong the look of some of the lenses is.

It's more visible on motion rather than on frame grabs, but still.

I also had a go at emulating some of that edge softness.  There's a whole world of ways you can do this in Resolve, but this is one way.

Here's the node graph.  If anyone is curious for an explanation of why I'm doing it this way, just ask.

Another thing about lenses is the flares, which are far more than just bloom.

For example, I love the way that zooms have lots of elements to their flares.

 

I've sort of been waiting for my adapters to arrive to shoot the next round of tests, but I figured that sharing some early impressions might be useful and help me organise my thoughts a bit too.

I shot my first round of the test quite poorly, so images have different exposures etc, which is why I wasn't sharing them before, but there are some interesting things to note from some of the different lenses.

The 14mm F2.5 is sharp from edge to edge and has relatively deep DoF, so this is a reference.

The Takumar 35mm F3.5 is sharp in the middle and still relatively deep DoF but has significant "zoom" radial blur on the edges.

..as does the Cosmicar 12.5mm F1.9..

The TTartisans 17mm F1.4 has a lot of blooming when wide open (but is clean from F2 onwards)

and the Yashica 28mm F2.8 has a lot of blooming when wide open too, although the blooming seems to be a lot larger (with the light from brighter areas being distributed a lot further away in the image than with the 17/1.4)

The blur on the edges of the Yashica also seems to have a lot of colour separation too:

unlike the TTartisans:

or Cosmicar:

The Mir-1b 37mm F2.8 is all over the place, reminding me that I have never liked it and never saw what others saw in it:

The Helios is about as you'd expect - sharp in the middle but edges that are hype-worthy despite essentially being a one-trick pony:

(Note that this is the Helios 44M, not the 44-2.  I have the 44-2 and it's easily one of the worst lenses I own, with blooming far in excess of anything I included in this test.  It sits in a drawer and stays there.)

In contrast to the Helios, the Takumar 55mm F1.8 is much cleaner (bearing in mind this is a shallow DoF image and I'm standing at an angle compared to the fence so the edge softness is likely to be partly the shallow DoF) :

The Voigt 42.5mm F0.95 is softer in the middle but has cleaner edges:

and the TTartisans 50mm F1.2 doesn't have the blooming of the Voigt, but might not be sharper as bloom and sharpness are independent attributes:

but the 12-35mm F2.8 makes all of these look positively vintage:

Obviously the other lenses can be stopped down to potentially be as sharp as this is, but I shot all these wide open to learn more about aesthetics, not to perform a technical test, because that's what MTF charts are for.

I'd like to say that I can draw some conclusions from this test but realistically it's too early.  I do have some impressions though.

I suspect I don't like the lenses that have too much bloom.  I bought a Tiffen Black Promist 1/8 and shot with it on the 12-35mm and ended up not liking the images in post, and some of these lenses are a lot more bloom-y than the BPM.  The purpose of using any lenses other than my AF set (9/1.7 and 14/2.5 and 12-35/2.8 and 14-140/3.5-5.6) is to get shallow DoF or DoF-related things (e.g. oval bokeh from anamorphics) which are essentially the only things you can't apply in post.

I have thought before that I don't really like colour separation, like the red halation from film or CA, but the example shots from Attack on London and also from the wide angle adapter don't seem that objectionable, so maybe I'm changing my mind about this?

One thing that came out of this test was how much I like the Tokina 28-70mm F3.5-4.5 zoom.  It has a vintage flavour for sure, but doesn't seem to be too degraded.

I am really looking forward to testing the wide angle adapter and 1.25x anamorphic adapter on this lens, as I suspect those adapters will be limited to around F2.8 anyway, so trading off the flexibility of a zoom for only one extra stop doesn't seem that worthwhile in that configuration.

The only lens not yet mentioned is the 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 kit zoom, which in this situation isn't that different from the 12-35mm F2.8.

The next test I'll shoot will have significant depth of field, so I can see things like bokeh shapes and rendering (e.g. swirly vs cats-eyes vs not), and I'll have to work out some way to expose all the images the same (or use the GH7 and correct in post) as exposure makes a difference perceptually.

I just wish my adapters would get here sooner!

15 hours ago, maxJ4380 said:

I have a sirui  in 24mm mft. I quite like it. when i first looked at it on youtube they were preproduction models i believe. I thought the flares might be a bit to much, however after buying it, i find the flares not to be too overpowering. I suspect either sirui toned them down or perhaps or youtubers sought out the absolute brightest lights to test on, which may not have been in the lenses best interests. Be interesting to see how your anamorphic adapter behaves.

Yeah, I watched a few comparison videos and took notes, decided I wanted the Blazar 1.5x adapter as it was the softest, lightest and had the least horizontal flares.  Then I looked up how much they all cost and bought the Sirui!

I genuinely have no idea if I'll like it, but I figure it should either be useful to take the edge off my modern zooms, or to add another layer onto my vintage lenses.  If I combine it with my 0.71 m42-m43 speed booster, it makes the end result a 1.14 crop factor, so basically a FF camera, which will make a lot of my lenses a bit easier to use in practice.

15 hours ago, maxJ4380 said:

It was prime day everywhere wasn't it ? may not have been just us aussies...

I got the email from Sirui Australia but I guess maybe the bottlenecks might be upstream.  Who knows.  Reverse-engineering global supply line logistics is probably an impossible task and won't get my adapter here any faster!

15 hours ago, maxJ4380 said:

btw i like your room light. I have been setting up a black velvet curtain and i have some fairy lights to do some bokeh experiments with. If i can find something similar it might make it in as a foreground object.

Thanks, my Global Head of Design was responsible for the selection.

My fairy lights are excellent - the lights are bright, tiny (so are essentially point sources), and the whole thing runs off a USB so no power adapters etc to deal with.  The wire is just a thin single-core wire so easily bends and is relatively fragile, so I'll have to work out where to put them up for testing.  I was thinking I might just put them up in my studio and when I want to test bokeh I can just plug a portable USB charger into them, turn off all the other lights and then wave the camera around.

3 hours ago, maxJ4380 said:

I see lots of banding in your images kye, i hope its mot just me lol. i presume that's from the jpg setting. I used to get banding from jpegs when i used them in timelapses till i learned better. Can you maybe up the jpeg quality a notch ? I know their only test shots, however i kinda feel the banding is hindering the visual aspect  abit.

 

Yes, I noticed it too, but as it was just a quick test I didn't bother.  It's just from the jpg compression so I'm not having to upload 8.5MB per image (yes, really!).  I'll watch for it on the next batch 🙂 

I got an email from Sirui Australia that shipping on my anamorphic adapter is delayed due to the Amazon Prime Day sales, so I'm guessing that lots of Aussies must have sent some money their way.

An update on my testing.

I was thinking about what I wanted - something low quality in the optical path to dirty up the image a bit, and then it struck me - what I want is a cheap wide angle adapter!  Then I remembered I had bought one years ago and went and found it and gave it a go.

It's too small for most of my lenses (it's 52mm but most of my lenses are 58mm) but is a cheap 0.45x wide angle adapter so I shot some quick tests.  Here are some direct with/without comparisons to give an idea of what does.  These are all SOOC so ignore the incorrect WB settings and mismatched exposures etc.  All lenses are wide open.

GX85 + 14mm F2.5 without adapter:

GX85 + 14mm F2.5 WITH adapter:

Very interesting and definitely makes the image wider.  If I use a zoom then I can match the framing and we can get a more direct comparison.

GX85 + 12-35mm F2.8 at 12mm without adapter:

GX85 + 12-35mm F2.8 at ~18mm WITH adapter:

GX85 + 12-35mm F2.8 at ~25mm without adapter:

GX85 + 12-35mm F2.8 at 35mm WITH adapter:

Very interesting results and in the direction I'm going for.  As a proof of concept it definitely has promise, but I'd need to buy one correctly sized of course.

BUT, then I put it on the TTartisans 50mm F1.2 and fully wide open (of course!) basically all hell breaks loose!

GX85 + TTartisans 50mm F1.2 without adapter:

GX85 + TTartisans 50mm F1.2 WITH adapter:

It's obviously not rated for F1.2 lenses!!

The bokeh is also heavily modified too, which the above images hint at, but check this out....

GX85 + TTartisans 50mm F1.2 without adapter:

GX85 + TTartisans 50mm F1.2 WITH adapter:

These are the sorts of things you can't do with plugins, so this is what I'd be chasing real optics to do.

However, the most interesting thing about a wide angle adapter is that it's basically a speed booster, so you get more light into the lenses and you also get a wider angle of view, which means that to get the same angle of view with the adapter you can use longer lenses, which can give shallower DOF for a given f-stop.  Double bonus for MFT!

So, I ordered the cheapest 58mm wide angle adapter I could find, and ordered the cheapest vND I could find to fit it (as the fronts are larger than the rear which makes it larger than my good vND.

Oh yeah, and I also watched a bunch of reviews of anamorphic adapters and after seeing the prices (wow!) I just ordered a Sirui 1.25x anamorphic adapter, which is the cheapest of the bunch by a long shot.  I'm not really that interested in the streaks but the softening and edge distortions should be great, and it's also like a horizontal-only speed booster so will let me use longer lenses for the same FOV.

14 hours ago, QuickHitRecord said:

I always enjoy your posts, Kye. Threads like this are keeping this forum alive.

This new Resolve plugin seems relevant to the discussion. I just downloaded a copy of this last night and had a play. It can't really affect bokeh much without a depth map (as shown, you can have AI generate one for you in Resolve), but even without it, the other characteristics can help create a unique aesthetic. It's a handy tool to have for those projects that won't allow for real vintage glass to be used -- which at least for me, seems to be most of them these days.

Interesting video, and I guess it really shows what can and cannot be done in post.

I have played with the AI depth mapping in Resolve in the past (maybe v18 or v19 but not v20) and I found that it was worse than the iPhone portrait mode, so wasn't really usable in most uncontrolled situations.  I suspect it will eventually get good enough to use, but I don't think that will happen that quickly.

The rest of the effects are already doable in Resolve if you're willing to do them the manual way with power-windows and plugins, but this tool is probably worth it if you wanted to do it fast or if you wanted a specific aesthetic.  Interesting demo though, and for what it does it seems pretty good.

5 hours ago, maxJ4380 said:

kye does your takumar 35mm f3.5 have any yellowing ? the reason i ask is I'm looking at 35mm takumars for that reason (thorium lenses i believe) rather than doing it in post. It will probably end up a one trick pony however i think i can live with that. 

No, I just went and looked and while both the 55mm F1.8 and also the Mir-1B next to it have some yellowing, with the Takumar having more than the Mir, my Tak 35mm F3.5 doesn't appear to have any.  However, be mindful that it's pretty easy to get rid of any yellowing in these lenses (IIRC even by just leaving the lens in the sun for a while) so mine might simply have been treated.

There is a time for a clean aesthetic.  There is a time for a more timeless more filmic aesthetic.  There are times for a far grittier aesthetic too.

Those who have been following my other thread will know I've mostly got my travel / walk-around AF setup nailed.  
(GH7 and GX85 bodies combined with the 14-140mm zoom, 12-35mm F2.8 zoom, 9mm F1.7, and 14mm F2.5 pancake lens)
This setup will give a relatively clean starting point which can be graded to create a pretty wide range of looks.  

However, not everything can be achieved in post.

I have also collected a bunch of modern MF lenses and vintage lenses over the years and these might be useful in creating other looks that I can't do in post with the above kit.  So I'm trying to work out if I should just archive them or if they're still good for anything I want to do, and if so, what might that be?

I've looked through my continually growing collection of lens comparisons, but found nothing conclusive.  Thus begins a moderately sized lens / camera test...

The setups included in the test are below.  The details in brackets are the FF equivalents.  

• OG BMPCC + 12-35mm F2.8 (35-100mm F8.0)
  This setup is included as I think it will be a reference for the rest of the setups (at worst) and might end up becoming part of my standard kit (at best).
   
• GF3 + 15mm F8 (30mm F16)
  This setup is included as it's essentially a modern Super-8mm camera, and considering it is absolutely tiny and takes the same batteries as the GX85 it's almost inconsequential to bring on a trip.
   
• GX85 with:
  • Modern: Panasonic 12-35mm F2.8 (24-70mm F5.6)
  • Modern: Panasonic 14mm F2.5 (28mm F5)
  • Modern: Panasonic 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 (28-84mm F7.0-11.2)
  • Modern MF: TTartisans 17mm F1.4 (34mm F2.8)
  • Vintage: Cosmicar 12.5mm F1.9 SB (36mm F5.5)
  • Modern MF: Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95 (35mm F1.9)
  • Vintage: SB + Yashica 28mm F2.8 (40mm F4.0)
  • Vintage: SB + Tokina 28-70mm F3.5-4.5 (40-100mm F5.0-6.4)
  • Vintage: SB + Takumar 35mm F3.5 (50mm F5)
  • Vintage: SB + Mir-1B 37mm F2.8 (53mm F4)
  • Vintage: SB + Takumar 55mm F1.8 (78mm F2.6)
  • Vintage: SB + Helios 44M 58mm F2.0 (82mm F2.8)
  • Modern MF: Voigtländer 42.5mm f0.95 (85mm F1.9)
  • Modern MF: TTartisans 50mm f1.2 (100mm F2.4)

I haven't included all my lenses, but the ones I have omitted have been included in other tests previously and are broadly similar to ones I have included, so if they become interesting as a result of this test I have some more reference materials. 

I watched a doco on Netflix the other day called Attack on London, and was really inspired by the look of the 'recreation' images they have obviously filmed for the doc, and seem to have used one of the filthiest anamorphic lenses around (and potentially added more dirt in post as well).  Here are some screenshots..  These might not have been streamed at the highest bitrate available, but I don't care - they look great and have so much texture and feel.

This isn't the exact aesthetic I'm going for, but it's one that I saw recently that has a lot of texture and FEEL.  My hope is to work out what the ingredients are to getting this kind of feel and then work out when I would want it and then work backwards to what equipment and processes I'd use to get it.

My initial impressions (guesses) are that the ingredients are:

• shallower DoF
• lower levels of sharpness
• decent amounts of grain
• film colours (especially having a tint and having subtractive sat)

The above images have more elements to them than this, but I don't care much for things like CA etc, so I don't think they're part of the minimum required elements.

I plan to shoot comparisons with the setups above in a range of different scenarios and then see what I can see, before moving onto the post workflows and what role those play.

47 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

It's been a while since I've been able to work on any kind of movie, but here are some recent landscapes photos. I'm not doing anything artistic, just trying to capture some of my favorite places the way they felt at the time. The only edits are very slight changes to saturation and exposure. 90% of my photos are from 10+ mile hikes so I only bring my lightweight 28mm and a CPL, but in this group is a rare photo taken from the roadside using a 24-105.

Nice images!

I feel like you've absolutely nailed the core concept - it's about capturing "the way they felt at the time".  This is where the pixel peeing leads the creativity astray, it's not about capturing the way it appeared at the time, it's the way it felt at the time.

6 hours ago, gt3rs said:

I don't recall if it was added in Resolve 18 or 19 but with the new feature you don't need to grab the still.

It works in edit and color page, File -> Export -> Export Current Frame as Still (I have mapped to F4). What is great it keeps the folder selection and the file format but you can change it at anytime, the file name will use timeline name + a time code as default.

So what I do is spacebar for play/pause, left or right arrow to select the best frame, hit F4 and Enter to save. Much faster that the old Still Grab process.

Wow, I'll have to look into this!!

Sounds super useful if you want to share something quickly rather than publishing a set of finished stills.  I have noticed over the years that I tend to continually refer back to the stills I have saved, so I've gotten much more organised in labelling them etc as they're more of a permanent reference than a temporary thing.

4 hours ago, gt3rs said:

It is since many years that I take stills out of the video instead of taking pictures, this is why I’m shooting mostly in 8k RAW.

 

I use Resolve, remapped the F4 key to export still, I first grade for the video, copy the timeline so I can do some tweaking to the grade still by still, if I like the result, I hit F4 and export the jpg, if I want to do a complete different edit I export as a tiff and edit in camera RAW. I normally do a quick pass in camera RAW to do the cropping as in Resolve is a pita as you would need to change the timeline resolution.

It would be cool to have an AI tool that finds the good ones especially when I use the 180 rules that finds the one with the no motion blur on the face. Right now, is a bit of a tedious move forward/backward.

What specifically have you mapped to F4?  Is it a two-step process to capture a still in the colour page, and then afterwards you have to export all the stills to the disk?  or is there now a way to directly save a frame from the timeline straight to the disk?  This is something many people have been wishing for..

1 hour ago, MrSMW said:

I just start a new timeline with the finished production as a single entity.

Or rather that is what I have been doing to date with the few attempts I have made.

I think what I will do now, for the rest of this year at least, is introduce a new chapter as it were in my process which is after culling, importing, colour grading, while the clips are all still 6k 30p on a 6k 30p timeline, but prior to any speed changes, transitions, graphics, text etc, is export a 3:2 6k copy and then pull the stills from that.

These will then match my same baked in LUT stills also in 3:2.

I can then import the results from both into Lightroom as a single set for any final grading and reexport as JPEGs.

The only thing I hoped to do other than this was have AI find, select and export 350-500 frames from clips for me…amd maybe that software exists and if it doesn’t it should as that will be one of those things worthy of the title ‘game changer’.

Kills or at least severely limits the photographer in me, but hey, choices…

Makes sense.

One other thing I just thought of is wondering if Lightroom can import stills directly from video files?  I have no idea, but I remember that Photoshop had integrated some rudimentary video functionality some time ago so maybe Lightroom has some?  It's not completely beyond comprehension that they might anticipate solo wedding shooters wanting to pull stills from video files.

One thing to keep in mind is the creative impacts of inserting a stills step into your video workflow.  On my last couple of trips I worked out a dailies workflow where I backed up the footage, pulled it into a timeline, applied some basic colour grading, and then reviewed it (it's a dailies workflow after all!) but also pulled stills as I went.  
The creative impact is that while looking for good stills I was focusing on clips that had a single good frame, which is often not creatively relevant for doing a video edit, and could definitely impact your mental inventory of your footage.  If you're doing this before you've done the edit, or if the edit is predictable or formulaic enough, then it might not matter, but otherwise it might negatively impact the editing process.

Resolve has an ever-increasing catalogue of AI features, but I doubt they'll be sophisticated enough to choose the nicest compositions and facial expressions etc, as making the happiest movie possible isn't really the focus of many film-makers.

The C100 would suffer from the same problem that all workhorse cameras suffer from - the best images from them are made by people who are so good at making images they don't post to social media and/or don't list their equipment if they do post.

I wonder how many big budget productions have C100 shots mixed in with the C200/C300 main stuff but used the C100 as a higher-risk or mounted cam due to its size and relatively low cost if something happened to it.

I've got the occasional beautiful image from my XC10 when the stars aligned and the location and lighting and composition were all working together, and that had a tiny sensor and 10x variable aperture zoom lens.  The C100 almost matched it in pixel-peeing terms despite being 1080p and In similar situations the much larger sensor and ability to have nice lenses would be game over.

VLC has a feature (available via a hotkey) that saves a screen grab as a PNG.  It's not a very good player though unfortunately, on Mac anyway.  It can't play backwards, and the feature to advance a single frame works at first but seems to get bogged down, and after you've advanced even a few frames it seems incapable of going back to playing again.

I know you said you were editing in Premier, but (IIRC) the free version of Resolve does timelines up to UHD and can grab screen grabs relatively easily.  It would require a bit of setup where you pull the clips into a timeline, then the grabbing would be like butter, then the export of all the grabs takes a few steps, but the ease of finding the right frames might be worth the 30s to setup and export at the end?

Both are options though.

16 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

I tend to like to deliver in 4k, but yes, post-cropping flexibility is the main reason that I usually capture in 6k or 8k for narrative.  I also like wider aspect ratios (even in film, where I like 6x17, 4x10, and 8x20 the most) so even shooting 4k gives some room to reframe up or down a little bit.

I deliver in 4K too.  Just upscale your 1080p project to 4K on export - no-one can tell the difference!

16 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

I used to have the EF 24-105/4 and I never liked it much, but I have the 24-70/2.8 and it's fantastic.  It could certainly be an option.  I've also, at various points in my life, considered the Canon 35-350/3.5-5.6L - still a fairly large lens, but it's a 10x zoom for FF that manages quality a bit nicer than a coke bottle.  It's pretty affordable used these days.  But I'm more likely to try to stick with things I already have.

Wow - 35-350mm....  now THAT is a lens!

16 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Guided safaris are extremely expensive from what I've seen.  It's potentially good advice, but I prefer that we go our own way.  There's always the possibility of seeing one of the guided tour buses rolling around and following it for a bit too.  Plus, if I gave somebody $1,000-2,000/day to show us the animals, I'd probably mentally feel a bit entitled when seeing them.  If we go on our own and I see a single giraffe head snacking on a tree, I'll be beside myself with excitement.  Plus we can research before arriving to see if there are sites listing the most likely places.

That's definitely a lot, and I can understand why you'd feel a bit entitled too, after paying so much.

If you're likely to see some animals while you're travelling around seeing other sites then that's probably the best way, as the animals you do see will seem like good fortune rather than focusing on the animals you paid to see and didn't.

Those other places seem really cool too.  Africa seems like a strange continent in many ways.  Of course, in lots of those ways it's quite like the remote places here in Australia, but although I've seen quite a number of them they still seem strange.  

20 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Truth.  Though by the time you make an MFT lens with equivalent DOF to a FF lens with the same FOV, it ends up around the same size.  It's one of the reasons the Canon 800/11 is (relatively) small, as are mirror lenses.  Not that DOF matters much for wildlife in the distance.

Equivalency of DOF is the elephant in the room for sure.  In comparison, MFT lacks in the selection of gargantuan lenses with super-shallow DOF and FF lacks in small lenses without shallow DOF.  If someone made a FF 28-280mm F7.0-11 lens then it should be the same size as my 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 lens, but of course the internet would go ballistic over it and run whatever manufacturer dared to create such an abomination out of town faster than you can say "grab your pitchforks - the devil has come for our children!".

It depends on what you're doing of course, but for me personally when I switched from watching YT lens reviews to watching award winning movies and TV shows from the worlds leading professionals I had the Ah-ha moment when I realised very few shots had shallower DOF than could be achieved with relatively normal MFT lenses.  Even when looking at the shots that would have required quite fast lenses on MFT, the aesthetic penalty for the DOF being deeper was very low.
I then looked at what potential benefits would be traded-away for it....  lighter cameras that make me more likely to carry them around and use them and therefore get more shots to use in the edit...  smaller equipment making me more pleasant to be around and having a nicer trip and causing the people around me to be happier and more relaxed and look nicer in frame...  the smaller rig making the people around me less distracted and suspicious...  the deeper DOF meaning there was less chance of having one person in focus but the others out of focus or it simply missing focus by focusing on the wrong thing...  the much lower likelihood of having a difficult conversation with law enforcement or self-important security staff, etc.  I concluded that getting slightly shallower DOF was a very small benefit competing against a significant number of advantages that would make far more impact to the end product and to my experience in using it.

39 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

I'll also keep in mind that I can get away with fewer lenses because 100 megapixels is a lot and because I can vary between 4k and 5.8k that are 44mm wide and 8k that's 36mm wide - that's a lot of focal lengths for each lens, assuming that the lenses resolve well.  The relatively tiny Fuji GF 50/3.5 is kind of amazing for that reason.

Of course, there are plenty of tiny FF lenses too - the Summicron-M's are small and something like the Canon 40/2.8 is fantastic.  I could just bring my R5 with that, I suppose. 

The extra cropping potential is one of the only benefits I can see for sensors above 2.5K.  I put the cropping modes on my GH5 and GX85 into good use when I was shooting on primes and have been hugely impressed with them with my GH7 + 9mm F1.7 PanaLeica which I'll use for shooting in ultra-low-light.

The R5 + EF-RF + 40mm F2.8 would be a great medium size setup.  Perhaps the best second camera FF setup I could think of would be your R5 + 24-105mm F4.  Like I mentioned above, the flexibility and speed of using a zoom when shooting in uncontrolled conditions just gives you more coverage - there's a reason doco and ENG shooters use zooms!

48 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Or I could just bring the Osmo Pocket 3 and call it good.  Some of my favorite photos from Peru were taken with it!  It's also really easy to keep handy in a pocket or I could probably hang it from a little carabiner on a belt loop or something like that.

Yeah, that's a real gem, I'm still seeing footage crop up on YT that really shows how much you can push things.  I've also noticed it's very popular with the vlogging crowd and it seems to give really good results, similar to those who might use a small mirrorless, which is definitely saying something when you consider the size of it.

48 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

You're gonna make me regret selling all of my MFT gear a few years ago.  😢

(I regretted it almost immediately, though I can make myself feel a bit better when I realize I wouldn't be using it most of the time)

Nah.

Do a complete end-to-end analysis of what gives you the best results in the final edit or final photos, work out what equipment aligns best with those trade-offs, buy it, test it and learn the settings, then shift focus to actually shooting and don't look back.

Beauty magazines make you feel ugly, and camera YT makes you regret your equipment.  Best strategy is to ignore both.

48 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

I haven't looked much into that - I know that late September is a considered a good time to go, partly because it's before a lot of the rains come in and I'm told that it's easier to find animals near watering holes.  I have no illusion that anything I do will be an award-winning photo, in any case. Heat waves or no, I'm sure the photos will make me happy as long as I can make out the animals.

By far the most important skill in uncontrolled environments is being able to understand and predict the behaviour of your subjects.  Not only does this matter for shooting people in public, but it matters doubly (triply?) for safari because the biggest struggle seems to be even finding the animals in the first place.

A professional animal tracker would probably get better footage with an iPhone than an amateur with all the equipment in the world who spent a week and only saw a few animals the whole time.  

Perhaps a good exercise is to think about what the total cost will be of the trip, think about how much it would matter if you didn't see any animals at all, and then see how much it would cost to hire a guide or some other service that would help you locate things.  There's a reason that people hire a model instead of just walking the streets hoping to find someone to shoot!

2 hours ago, Ty Harper said:

I wholeheartedly agree with where this sentiment is coming from - but I think the pressing/prudent thing to spend that leave on is wrapping our heads around generative AI (etc) and how that tech will likely transform/disrupt our current creative media workflows and the creative media economy. 

Yes, AI is a real wildcard.

I see that there are really three fundamentally different groups when it comes to generative content.

The first is professionals who create material for the general public, or various niches of the public.  This is where AI will have incredible impacts.

The second is professionals who create for their clients directly.  This is people like wedding photographers etc, where the client is the audience.  This has been debated, but I think that there will still be a market here.  If I did something and wanted a record of it, I would want the final images to be of me, not AI generated content that looks like the people I know might have looked during the thing that actually happened.

The third is people creating for themselves, where there is no client or money changing hands.  This is every amateur, every personal project from professionals, etc.  The goal is to have a final result that this person created.  Amateur photographers take photos and print and hang the best ones, not because they're the best photos ever taken, but because they were taken themselves.

Personally, I'm in the last category and I am completely resigned to the fact that my videos will never be great, will never attract a significant audience, will never be regarded as important, etc, but that's not why I do it so in that sense AI is no threat to me at all.  I do understand that people are all in different segments of the industry and have very different perspectives for very good reasons..

11 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

A second camera with a wider angle lens (or zoom) isn't a bad idea.  I'm afraid a second GF body is probably not going to be in the budget for me, but a second small camera or film camera isn't out of the question!  I'll hope that the elephant doesn't ram us too much, though - we're likely to rent a truck with a rooftop tent or some other form of camper or van.  It would stink to have our home get crushed.

A phone is always a great second camera in a pinch..  but if there's budget, it's hard to look past the GX85 or LX10.  They're comparatively small, especially if you fit the GX85 with one of the pancake zoom lenses.

11 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

I may also bring my older Canon EF 100-400 - but carry-on space is limited!

Jeez, it's lenses the whole way isn't it.  A sensor size goes up, lens size goes up exponentially...

Maybe you should rent an MFT system?

11 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Definitely true about heat waves getting to be a problem eventually - and while they weren't a big deal here yesterday near sundown at about 24C, they're likely to be more of a thing in Namibia in September at 34C.

I understand that lots of the wildlife is best seen at dawn?  Things can be pretty still then, so that works in your favour.  Not sure how things go at dusk as the sun shouldn't have been heating things directly for a while and temps could even out a bit.  But if you're shooting big cats sitting lazily in trees during the middle of the day it'll be heat shimmer galore.

11 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

That is definitely true.  I have an old Telyt-R 560mm ... maybe an f/5.6(?) around here somewhere (got it at a garage sale, of all things).  The biggest problem that I have with it, and by extension other vintage extreme telephotos, is that aside from the lens IS, things seem to have loosened up a bit and every time there's a slight breeze or I even look at it, it vibrates for about 20 seconds.  Might be better on the GH5?

Yeah, these old lenses can be a bit beat-up sometimes.  The GH5 does a great job with stabilisation, but there's no getting around the fact that you're trying to hand-hold an 800mm FOV lens, or trying to use it on a crappy tripod where the only thing "fluid" about the head on it is the words in the product description!

On 6/30/2025 at 9:27 PM, PPNS said:

prepping a no budget feature.

here's some stuff that i like somewhat from the past year and a half or so:
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wonderful images...  great stuff!

This is my most recent finished edit.

I wrote the music for this too.

I've shared it before, but some might not have seen it.  Shot on the trip I did to Seoul last August where the wife and I got sick and spent most of our time in the hotel.

OG BMMCC + 12-35mm F2.8 + TTartisans 50mm F1.2.  Graded in Resolve with heavy use of the Film Look Creator tool.  Music written in Logic Pro.

7 hours ago, Davide DB said:

Speaking of new cameras...

This was shot by a friend of mine on a "vintage" Lumix LX10 in Nauticam housing and different wet diopters.

 

 

This looks incredible!

Great images and colour, and I really like the music and edit too.

It really is a different world down there isn't it...

7 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Today I stepped out to poke around a local park to look for a spot for the feature I'll be shooting soon.  I took the chance to finally take out the Canon 35/1.4 and the Fujinon 500/5.6 to test them on the GFX, the latter especially because I'll be going to Namibia in a few months and will want/need something for wildlife in the distance, especially when driving around Etosha.

The 35/1.4 on the GFX is totally fine, no complaints.  The 500/5.6 is... astounding.  I would usually say that sharpness isn't the most important thing for a lens, but with this sort of telephoto, I guess it kind of is - I'm going to care less about lens character when trying to photograph a giraffe in the distance eating the leaves from the top of a tree (I really hope I get to see a giraffe!!!) and I'm probably going to care a lot more about being able to crop in and discern the giraffe.

I have a number of other fairly competent telephotos, but this one is just on another level.

Here is a still photo of another park across the river with the 35/1.4.  I saw a person by the storm drain and thought maybe I'd caught an urban explorer in the act...

However, with the 500/5.6, I realized I couldn't have been more wrong.  GF in 8k mode here and on a 4k scope timeline since that's what my scratch project is set to...

 

And at 4x zoom in Resolve (for 1:1 from 8K):

And his friend nearby, 8k and 1:1 punch in from 8K...

The still photos had even a little more detail still - even though the light is imperfect, I can make out individual hairs of the hairs of the beard of the guy fishing by the drain.  I also need to do a couple of tests with the Fuji 1.4x TC to push the lens out to around 700mm - it's a great TC and I barely notice any loss of detail with the 250/4 so I'm assuming that'll be true with the 500/5.6 as well.  If so, I'll have some confidence that I can do alright with the wildlife of Etosha!

That's a hell of a lens!

I have a Tokina 400mm F5.6 permanently on my GH5 now to act as a telescope because I looked into buying one and it was cheaper and more fun to buy a super-telephoto lens!  It's not super-sharp wide open but in daylight you can just stop down, plus anything that is quite far away suffers from heat haze anyway, so the sharpness of the air is the limiting factor.

I've thought about going on safari for years but have never actually gone.  My thinking eventually lead me to the idea of having two bodies, one with a very long lens on it, and the other one with a very shot zoom on it so you can get shots of when the monkeys start stealing food out of your van, or the elephants ram you.  My impression from social media is that these things are practically guaranteed to happen.

I have the PanaLeica 100-400mm on my "when I'm a millionaire" list as it seems it would be perfect for things like a safari where you never know how far away the subjects are going to be.

3 hours ago, ac6000cw said:

A GH7 + 12-100mm would be nearly 1.4 kg.

Ouch!!

My GH7 (with battery, card, 14-140mm, and vND) is just over 1.1kg.  The 12-100mm is just a hair under 300g heavier, so the GH7 + 12-100mm combo would actually be a hair above 1.4kg by the time it's fully functional, and my setup doesn't even include any audio equipment, so that's also something to take into consideration.

I walked around Pompeii carrying the GH5 + Voigtlander 17.5mm + Rode Videomic Pro (1.4kg) in my hand for several hours, raising it up when I saw something I wanted to shoot.  My wrist was sore for several days afterwards, just from having the weight on it for that long.  It might be something you'd get used to, but having to train so you have the strength and stamina to carry a camera around seems a bit much to me!

3 hours ago, ac6000cw said:

As a 'travel' lens, IMHO the combination of low weight and focal length range makes the 14-140mm almost perfect (other than in really low light, of course).

I agree.  The high-ISO performance is actually quite impressive too.  For low-light I have the 9mm F1.7 with CrZ and if I want longer range than that I have the 12-35mm F2.8.  Probably the only other lens I would get for super-low-light shooting is the PanaLeica 15mm F1.7 because it's small and fast and being a Leica lens should be nice and sharp wide-open so the CrZ mode should be quite usable with it.