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I was there for the first time in December, family in tow. It was a great trip, just the right amount of difference as you say, high-tech toilets included! I've read and heard so much about Japan that I felt like we didn't scratch the surface much. We stayed in an airbnb away from the tourist areas and caught trains everywhere, but I think we just didn't get off the beaten path as much as I would have liked. I would have liked to go to some of the more local food places, ramen especially, but the kids are picky and getting four adjacent seats in those tiny places where it's just the chef and the vending machine outside seemed pretty unlikely. We were only there for a few days, so if there was a bit more time I might have ventured out by myself and blundered through a some local experiences. I've put it on my (very short) list of countries to re-visit. Most countries get put a long way down the list when you have a choice of being somewhere you've been before or visiting somewhere new, but Japan is an exception for me. The other is Hong Kong, which I really liked - stress free with plentiful English speakers, but busy and interesting with lots of foreign things to look at and experience. It's gradually getting absorbed into China, so the homogenisation of globalisation will be slightly counteracted as it becomes more Chinese again. I used to pride myself on not watching TV, but I think I have to shift my perspective on watching YT to it being the same as TV. That will be a bit of a shock internally when I do! You're right about where you live being less important than how you live. Wherever we live, if tourists visited they'd be fascinated and taking photos of all sorts of interesting things that we drive past while thinking about going on holiday to wherever they live. My list of places I think I would like to live in part-time is Australia (base of operations and family), Hong Kong, and somewhere in Europe. The wife is pretty fond of Italy, but we recently spent a month there and the people weren't as friendly as she was anticipating. I've got friends who live in Spain and they say it's nicer than Italy and a lot cheaper too, but they'd have to convince the wife, and the heart wants what it wants and all that

Jeez. This would have to be one of the best production-value-per-dollar things you can buy. In the list under "buy first camera", "buy first microphone", "buy first tripod", and "learn how to use lighting"

Japan is one of the places that an old-school WTF travel experience is still available in the modern age. Many big cities are understandable now because of things like google translate (especially the augmented reality camera mode) and the common basis of Latin derivative culture, there are differences of course, but not "I've been watching this for an hour and still have no idea" type situations. In Japan you point Google Translate at the writing and it doesn't recognise the font, you look at the people and everyone keeps to themselves, shopkeepers look at you blankly if you speak to them in English, and you watch what people are doing and often it makes no sense. Of course, that's off the beaten track away from the tourist areas, but still, quite fun! http://blog.adw.org/2016/10/eight-stages-rise-fall-civilizations/

Wow. That would change things a little!

Yeah ???

That is truly impressive, and gives really natural looking movement too. I'm assuming that you have some kind of remote control with variable speed? If something like the Osmo could use a phone to detect angle (like those point-where-I-point remotes for the Ronin etc) and you had a left-right control for the tracker you'd have a really intuitive control system. String one of these between two trees at a venue and you're set. It's not as easy to position as a 360 camera on a extendable pole, but the movement is next level. Very nice!!

Not a bad discount, although I can't help notice that less people are buying this than those audio plugins. I wonder why? ???

Yeah, I've moved house a lot, and in some ways I feel like if I had just had a single house growing up and one or two as an adult I'd have had more time and energy to invest in other things. Moving house is kind of a major project that you wouldn't want to do more than once a year. I'd be a lot of major projects ahead of where I am now, that's for sure. Then again, if you just stop watching TV and do projects instead you can accomplish quite a lot over time. I read a book about being an expat and it was interesting. One of the things that it mentioned was that every place you go is an opportunity for you to see how other people live and to potentially adopt a few of their habits into your life. Unfortunately as you get older you fit into any single culture less and less, and when you come 'home' you find that you no longer fit in there either. There's definitely challenges that go along with the glossy postcard moments! Actually, we're not so different in terms of size: https://www.commsec.com.au/content/dam/EN/ResearchNews/2018Reports/November/ECO_Insights_191118_CommSec-Home-Size.pdf Average size of new homes in US 202.0sqm and Australia 186.3sqm. Existing houses would be interesting to see the stats on, but I think that the US has more extremes. Yes, there are huge McMansions that Australia doesn't have that many of (we do have some) but we also have far less apartments than the US. It's easy to get caught up in the "everything in the US is bigger" hype (those Texans sure talk a big game) but we're getting closer in car sizes too. The most common cars here are large family vehicles, which are a lot more popular here than smaller cars like Corollas or whatever. The US is still beating us though, but only because they're desperately trying to overcompensate for something... https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/australia-taking-on-american-love-of-big-cars-38036 Besides, Texas is pretty small actually.. it's not even the largest state in the US

Motion would be great, maybe a base that leans the camera left, then upright and right, then upright and back left again... It would move vertically a bit, but they don't need to be kept level, so that might work. Probably your bigger issue would be keeping it from moving if it was on a long pole. You'd also want to keep it away from objects in the foreground too, as they would show off any camera movement there was, unless everything was moving of course. In terms of the edges, they used to not be that great but they're pretty darn good now. Have a look at this to get an idea of it. There are a few times you notice the edges, but it's basically seamless. You don't want to crop in that much TBH, because it has to fit the entire 360degree image into the 4K / 8K / 11K resolution, and also into the bitrate. An 18mm lens on FF has a horizontal angle of 90 degrees, so a quarter of the width and something like a quarter the height depending on aspect ratios. This would mean that your frame has only 6% of the bitrate of the full capture. That's why they're only currently usable for really wide shots, and even then the compression is still really obvious, even when put through YT compression. If you were concerned about the edges of the lenses then you could just turn it around so that one side of the camera is lined up with the main shot you want, so the stitching and pixelation etc is towards the edges of the frame. Obviously if you're carrying it around freehand then you'll end up using the bits on the edges of the lenses, but if you just plant it for a static shot then it wouldn't be too hard to pay attention to which way it was facing.

Both lenses work almost flawlessly. Here is a sample shot from each: There are some spots when you stop down to f8 or over, but a lot of it is common to both lenses, so the quick sensor clean I did with the air blower wasn't 100% effective it seems. I'll still clean the lenses, but it's amazing how well they work, considering

This is an interesting article on making your own cheap desiccant pouches for keeping a sealed container low in humidity. https://www.instructables.com/id/Inexpensive-Dessicant/ The highlights are, buy kitty litter and put it into those little mesh gift bags that people put lollies or whatever in at weddings. I've ordered a hygrometer to measure the humidity in my house and see if I have an issue to start with. it's not that humid here, so I'm not that worried. This is also useful: https://www.zeiss.com/camera-lenses/int/service/content/fungus-on-lenses.html So, if fungus is everywhere, then nothing stopping me putting these lenses on my camera and seeing how bad the images are

You'd be surprised. I already own these lenses and so am taking photos to highlight the fungus. Many ebay auctions don't shine a light into the lens so you can only just tell that there's fungus there - notice how the auctions all say something like "the photographs are part of the description of the lens, please make sure you check them before purchase". Lots of the auctions don't even have photos through the glass at all. This one is interesting.... it's from a current live auction, and it's going for about three times the price of previous fungus-free items.

Tell me about it! https://www.businessinsider.com.au/australia-has-5-of-the-worlds-20-least-affordable-cities-in-which-to-buy-a-home-2016-9 What's amusing about that list is that Australia only has 5 cities with more than a million people in them, so every one of them is in the top 20 Then again, how much would someone have to pay me to move away from all my friends, all my extended family, all my clients and professional contacts, all my kids friends, etc etc... My plan is to add locations to live in, not remove this one. I also left out something from my above summary. If you're interested in investing then you can buy and rent out properties (or invest in industrial real-estate which is a better investment in some locations) and then use rental income to offset the cost of temporary accommodation wherever you're actually staying. That gets around foreign ownership laws, etc.

I think that's because the spores get into all the grooves and mechanisms. Of course, non-infected lenses can become infected at any time just by sucking in a spore during normal use. Ultimately it's about keeping them in such a way that prevents the fungus already inside them from growing. Dry and exposed to light is the way to go. My second infected lens arrived. Looks like a different type, and has a lot more coverage, but perhaps with smaller colonies than the last one. It's important to have variety in life I think. The front elements: The back elements: This lens is also as new. From same seller, so I suspect from the same source. This one came with a lens hood!

I think film is a lot like audio, where everything in the signal path just makes things worse, and the high quality stuff still makes things worse, but only by a little bit. I think all the nice lenses must be at least 16-bit ???

Not to Puerto Rico! I'm playing a long game to disconnect where I live from how I make my money, so having a more international lifestyle, kind of like the Digital Nomad dream. I remember when I was young and you'd see the snooty rich people saying "we spend our summers in the south of France" in their snooty accents while looking down their noses at everyone else who can't afford to do that. Later on in life the thought crossed my mind that if you can work remotely (or work online, etc) then you can do that "summers in the south of France" kind of lifestyle too. Instead of buying an average house (the median house price here in Australia is something like AU$800k!) you can live really simply and can buy two or three small apartments in small out-of-the-way towns in various places around the world, and just travel between them. That was about 15 years ago, and now we have airbnb, housesitting, and other sharing platforms, and this means you don't have to own anything really. As soon as you look at real-estate more than a 3-hour drive from any capital cities CBD then prices drop significantly, and so the rent-for-a-few-months price goes down below the cost of renting a not-great place in the suburbs. If you're interested in building capital with property ownership then buying multiples at $100k a pop is still an option, assuming you can navigate the foreign ownership laws of whatever country you're looking at. Possibly the biggest challenge is that you move away from your friends, family, kids, etc. It's a big deal for people who retire to somewhere warmer that they leave behind their social and support networks. My long game is to live between the same few locations and build up networks in each of them. Of course, I have to work out how to pay for everything first Good thread.

It's a good idea to kill the fungus, but they release spores so you can't completely kill every spore that will be distributed all through the whole lens mechanism, you'll only be cleaning the glass elements, not the sides or all through the aperture blades, etc. That's why I said you have to treat all your lenses like they're infected, because they probably all are. That stuff is only sold in the US, and although I can get it shipped the product page says to ensure it's never frozen, so I'm not that confident about shipping it. Does air cargo ever freeze? It's pretty cold up there..

Something worth considering is that the Studio versions from the App Store and with the hardware dongle are slightly different - the App Store one has a few less features. My understanding is that they're criteria from Apple, but basically it's (slightly) crippled.

Interesting. That stuff looks promising - 'kills fungus' 'leaves no chemical residue' seems to be hitting the right points. I liked the idea from the tutorial I liked earlier of running things under water then blowing the droplets off with a blower. I'd be inclined to do a rinse cycle in distilled water so that on the chance that any droplets are left they would evaporate without leaving anything behind. Do you know how your camera shop friend cleans the lenses? Does he spray that stuff onto the lenses and wait, or does he just get in there and rub? When using the chemicals method they say you have to wait until the fungus gets rinsed off under running water, and not to scrub it because you might scratch the lens. That makes sense I guess as the fungus might have sharp bits in there, so with the toy disinfectant I wonder if it dissolves the fungus if left to soak? No idea. I've read that you want the fungus to be smaller (as they're less old and won't have eaten into the glass as much) and around the edges in preference to in the middle, and towards the front in preference to the back. So basically everything opposite to the one I have! I would imagine there are some people quietly beavering away buying the lenses they know are saleable, serviceable, and putting them back on sale. I'd imagine this would be the same for adapting lenses and other niche things. If you look through the listings for a popular lens on ebay you'll notice that every so often one of them will have 10 people watching it, when the lenses either side of basically identical price will have no attention at all. I look through listings like this trying to work out why some get attention, and is there something that other people know that I don't, like is it a different version or whatever. One thing that always gets attention is a PL mount, sometimes it's converted mount but other times it's just a lens with an adapter, but the people searching for "lens PL mount" won't know there are heaps of them and will only choose from those search results.

That's the impression I get too. I figure that if it has etched into the glass then the light that hits that point will get scattered randomly and I'll just get a bit less contrast, and maybe a dark spot? It looks like it's further back in the lens, which I understand is more in-focus than spots on the front of the lens.

Yeah, the lenses might already be toast, but who knows. It's fun trying, right? Dry boxes is the general concept I think. Anything that protects them from dust and you can keep humidity out of is fine. I'm thinking some kind of translucent container like a lunch box or small organiser should be fine, but I haven't done the research yet so maybe there's a piece missing from my knowledge as yet.

Damn. You're right, I think I confused myself. My 44-2 doesn't have a pin and the aperture is fully manual. My other Helios, which I bought as a 44-4, but is only labelled 44M, has the pin and a Manual/Auto switch. According to camerapedia the M just means m42 mount. But there are heaps of people who have lenses that don't have switches and can't set the aperture manually. I also checked the Fotga adapter, and it definitely doesn't press the pin. Looks like the advice is to get a 44-2 or make sure you get the manual/auto switch. Sorry @Stab, hope you didn't hit ebay in the last couple of hours? ???

The 44-4 doesn't need the adapter to push the pin, so get that one and get the cheapest adapter that looks sturdy. I've bought a number of cheap Chinese adapters and they're all solid and work fine for me. I've currently got my 44-4 on a Fotga non-SB adapter as a 116mm equivalent lens, and my 44-2 on a cheap Chinese SB (it's a SB and mount adapter in one) as a 80mm lens, but I've got more lenses in-transit so I'm not sure if they'll stay in my lineup. They are quite soft, and prone to flare from highlights within the frame, so I might end up liking a more generic lens instead. Now I've found the 5K mode on my GH5 that has much less sharpening I don't need the lenses to do as much softening for me. Vintage lenses are so cheap, plentiful and interesting that it's hard to fight the urge to try all of them Not to tempt you (ha ha ???) but there are some other nice lenses similar to the Helios. I've got a Mir 1B 37mm f2.8 on order that's meant to be the 35mm equivalent of the Helios, so that'll be interesting when it arrives. You can even buy them new!

I've gone a little crazy and ordered a bunch of cheap vintage lenses, some with fungus in them. I've ordered some without fungus, but I'm not 100% that they won't contain any, and cleaning them is probably a good idea anyway, so I'm kind of jumping in at the deep end, and I thought I'd just make a new thread to compile my notes etc. This might be useful because in my reading I've discovered that there are a bunch of threads online about cleaning fungus where people don't know the first thing about anything, so they're just full of BS basically. Here are some interesting links and notes I've gathered so far: Alcohol, vinegar, consumer grade acids, UV from the sun or otherwise, aren't effective (or will damage the lens if concentrated) says a microbiologist, and they recommend caustic soda (Sodium Hydroxide) (source) This is a nice tutorial on how to do it and they recommend Hydrogen Peroxide and Household Ammonia (source) Sodium Hydroxide / caustic soda is widely available, but is a powder and must be dissolved to be used, unfortunately neither of the above talk about concentrations to use. Adding it to water also creates a lot of heat, risking splashing, so it's not nice or safe stuff to work with. I've looked for tips from a lens maintenance person and unsurprisingly I couldn't find anyone that would give away trade secrets for free. It's kind of difficult to tell who knows what as lots of people say "I did X and it worked" but the consensus is that storing lenses without lens caps in a relatively well-lit room will prevent fungus growth, so these people might be completely full of it and just have a well-lit room. You can never fully cleanse lenses of fungus (or protect them from it in use either) so you need to view every lens as potentially contaminated and store them somewhere there is light available and is dry. Leaving lens caps off and using a desiccant are commonly recommended strategies. Some suggest using cheap filters instead of lens caps but your mileage may vary. More research is required. The lens tear-down videos I've watched show that many of these old lenses were designed to be serviced and that you can get to the optics without having to mess with the sensitive aperture mechanisms which is really cool. Only one of my fungus lenses has arrived so far, but here's a shot of my new friend.... No, the lens isn't cracked, that's just the edge of the rear of the lens being lit up by the torch. Apart from the colony the lens is super nice, and basically looks new. Anyone else taken the plunge with cleaning lenses?

+1 for getting it. There are a few different versions and it's a little complicated. Here's what I remember as being important: The name of the lens is Helios 44. It's often described as Helios 44-2, or 44-4, etc. These are the same lens model with slightly different features. The number in the model number 44-X is supposed to relate to the lens' resolution, so higher numbers are optically better. However, due to poor QC in manufacturing, some higher number lenses aren't as sharp as lower numbered examples. Plus they're all old now, so might be scratched or whatever. The lenses have a pin that the camera uses to close the aperture, so for the aperture control on the 44-2 lens to work you need to cover the pin. This is relevant because my Fotga m42 to m43 adapter doesn't press the pin, but my cheap m42 to m43 focal reducer does. The solution is the 44-4 which has a switch to set manual mode where the pin doesn't matter. The lenses are built like tanks, so don't worry if there are scuffs or whatever, but beware any that have fungus or haze in them. Ebay auctions often have a shot through the lens onto a plain background so you can see any issues, these are safer (but not completely safe). They can be a little soft, so make sure you like the look before you buy. Have a look through the completed auctions to see what you should pay - there are heaps for sale so don't pay too much! Enjoy!