kye

These are really nice. I've been to Japan once but these don't remind me of it much. I was staying in a suburb and didn't go out at night much. It looks like I missed some great things.
You know when it's night time like this, I don't even notice lens imperfections much. It just seems natural when under that kind of light.
 

The camera is here.  As far as I can see, there is a single decent-sized piece of dust on one of the internal ND filters and that's it.  I cannot see any other marks on the camera's sensor assembly.  The speck is big enough that I could imagine it being a little bit visible on a big blue sky, but in a way that'd be not hard to clone out.  I'm also going to have to experiment with shaking the camera a little bit and/or blasting a rocket blower into the vent holes/fans.  It's hard to imagine how that little sucker got in there.  Worst case, if I decided to send it to CPS, I have to assume it'd be a pretty cheap repair.
Overall, I'll gladly trade that for the $1,500 price reduction vs new.  😅

That's a key point.  Or "Kye" point, if you will.  My handheld shooting drifts and sways a bit, as I like that sort of kinetic visual energy.  Not all IBIS handle this camera movement AND stabilization elegantly.  Rapid shifts of the image that are unwanted can happen.  Fuji is a disappointment in this regard and it makes shooting my style of video with my X-T5 pretty much useless.  Meanwhile I can "dance" pretty good with LUMIX and Olympus.

I don't want to side-track the thread by diving into IBIS but I find that mostly the specs of "stops of stabilisation" are meaningless, as the limiting factor is what it does when you reach the limits of the mechanism, not what stabilisation can do if you don't shake it that much.  A much more meaningful factor in the performance of these mechanisms is the way it responds to movement, like the difference between the mode that stabilises by smoothing the shake and the one that emulates a tripod by eliminating it as much as possible.  I also found the behaviour of the OG BMPCC and BMMCC to be excellent, being about 80% towards eliminating the movement but not quite being clinical about it, a very nice feeling response.
Maybe I'm just using it in far more aggressive ways and therefore constantly pushing it to its limits.  I really like the Dual IS where it combines the lens OIS with the IBIS too.  I shoot everything up to 280mm equivalent handheld, and frequently shoot while tired, while hungry, while cold, while holding the camera in odd positions or at the very edge of my reach, etc, so this probably isn't something most people really test that much.  
I often look at shots I have taken and wonder why I didn't hold it a bit more still, or didn't pan a bit to the right, and then I remember I was shooting blind holding the camera out the window of a moving vehicle and framing in my head while paying attention to the posts flying past, or while walking down stairs into a cave while holding the camera in one hand and the handrail in the other trying not to hit my head.
The Crop Zoom function is nice, if a bit limiting (it won't go past 1:1 so if you're shooting 4K you can't get much crop, whereas the GH5 and GX85 2x and 4x crop didn't care and gave you the extra reach regardless, with the ETC 1:1 mode giving you a 1:1 if you wanted it).

Back from a visit to Japan.
We spent most of the time in a small town but went to Tokyo for a weekend, so I shot a lot in Tokyo and used the rest of the time to test a range of lenses I took just for that purpose.
I tested the 12-35mm F2.8 for Night Cinema and it worked great and I loved the images, but as it got darker I kept cranking up the ISO and in the end it just didn't have the levels for the truly dark backstreets.


I also tested the tiny 35mm F1.6 c-mount CCTV lens I got off ebay some time ago.  It produced some really nice images in the right scenarios, but the plane of focus was so incredibly distorted that any scene with stuff off-centre in the frame would look really strange.
It had more level than the 12-35mm but still fell short of my better options.



My themes for the place emerged very quickly....   vending machines, bicycles, and lanterns.  Anyone who has been to Japan will be surprised by this exactly zero percent.
At this point we went to Tokyo and I treated it like a Night Cinema interval event, basically shooting as much as I could.
I shot a whole sequence from the hotel window as the sun set using the Takumar 50mm F1.4 and SB, my go-to setup.




I did a number of walks around the local area with the same setup.  Each time I went out I liked using the setup more, and each time I reviewed the files I liked the images I got from it more as well.  After China I was feeling like it was a bit too vintage / low-fi but I've really warmed to it since.



I found myself a bit at odds with Japanese culture, especially in regards to the fervent dislike of badly-behaved foreigners and the locals dislike for being filmed in public (despite the fact no-one will tell you they don't like it), so I mostly filmed the place and not the people, or at least I didn't tend to film individual people, instead including them small in the frame, or en-mass, or out of focus.
I think that lent itself to the cultural experience as well.  The city, and to many extents the culture, dwarfs the individual, placing the focus on the group.  As a tourist I can only glimpse the culture from afar, so taking the perspective of the outsider in the compositions is very much representative of the experience.





My "big" outing was a walk from Shibuya to Harajuku on our last night there.  As these places are known for youth and fashion and culture (and the counter-culture that fashion normally draws from) I concentrated on the grittier side of these areas.  I also leaned into the layers and the overall chaos of the place, taking advantage of the Takumars ability to focus on a small slice of the chaos, both through the 70mm FOV and also the shallow DOF.




Back in the small town I did more "test" walks with the TTartisans 50mm F1.2 (100mm F2.4 equivalent), the Helios 44M + SB combo (82mm F2.8 equivalent) and Takumar + SB combo for comparison (71mm F2.0).
As the small town was much less dense I found the extra reach of the TTartisans to be useful, and the DOF was shallow enough to be useful at distance, and the image was much cleaner across the frame compared to the Tak.


The Helios 44M was a different beast.  I felt like I was fighting with it basically the whole time and came back from the shoot thinking it was a bust and I'd wasted an outing.  The FOV often seemed wrong, it lacked the aperture to get enough light to the sensor and I was pushing the ISO a lot, the DOF was also deeper and so I found myself having to get closer to objects to get the separation I wanted, which then meant I was too close and the parallax motion from my hand-held movement was really distracting.  The focus on my copy is very stiff and it is a very low gear so to go from distance to closer focus had the ergonomics of opening a jar where something sticky had gotten into the threads.  
Still, I got back from the shoot and lots of the images looked really nice, which I think is to do with the extra diffusion this has.  It was also better behaved on the edges of the frame compared to the Tak too.



One thing that isn't obvious from the frame grabs is the ghosting from the strong light-sources in frame, and because I shoot hand-held and have IBIS active, they move in unnatural ways.  At first I thought they were coming from my vND but if anything they got worse on both the TTartisans and Helios after I took it off.
I think due to this I'll have to lean into the imperfections in the grade and edit and go lo-fi, which is why I've applied a film emulation softening equivalent to 20mm film to the Helios footage.
I also shot a lot with the iPhone 17 while there, normally during the day for non-cinema purposes, but that's a different topic for another time.

Back from a visit to Japan.
We spent most of the time in a small town but went to Tokyo for a weekend, so I shot a lot in Tokyo and used the rest of the time to test a range of lenses I took just for that purpose.
I tested the 12-35mm F2.8 for Night Cinema and it worked great and I loved the images, but as it got darker I kept cranking up the ISO and in the end it just didn't have the levels for the truly dark backstreets.


I also tested the tiny 35mm F1.6 c-mount CCTV lens I got off ebay some time ago.  It produced some really nice images in the right scenarios, but the plane of focus was so incredibly distorted that any scene with stuff off-centre in the frame would look really strange.
It had more level than the 12-35mm but still fell short of my better options.



My themes for the place emerged very quickly....   vending machines, bicycles, and lanterns.  Anyone who has been to Japan will be surprised by this exactly zero percent.
At this point we went to Tokyo and I treated it like a Night Cinema interval event, basically shooting as much as I could.
I shot a whole sequence from the hotel window as the sun set using the Takumar 50mm F1.4 and SB, my go-to setup.




I did a number of walks around the local area with the same setup.  Each time I went out I liked using the setup more, and each time I reviewed the files I liked the images I got from it more as well.  After China I was feeling like it was a bit too vintage / low-fi but I've really warmed to it since.



I found myself a bit at odds with Japanese culture, especially in regards to the fervent dislike of badly-behaved foreigners and the locals dislike for being filmed in public (despite the fact no-one will tell you they don't like it), so I mostly filmed the place and not the people, or at least I didn't tend to film individual people, instead including them small in the frame, or en-mass, or out of focus.
I think that lent itself to the cultural experience as well.  The city, and to many extents the culture, dwarfs the individual, placing the focus on the group.  As a tourist I can only glimpse the culture from afar, so taking the perspective of the outsider in the compositions is very much representative of the experience.





My "big" outing was a walk from Shibuya to Harajuku on our last night there.  As these places are known for youth and fashion and culture (and the counter-culture that fashion normally draws from) I concentrated on the grittier side of these areas.  I also leaned into the layers and the overall chaos of the place, taking advantage of the Takumars ability to focus on a small slice of the chaos, both through the 70mm FOV and also the shallow DOF.




Back in the small town I did more "test" walks with the TTartisans 50mm F1.2 (100mm F2.4 equivalent), the Helios 44M + SB combo (82mm F2.8 equivalent) and Takumar + SB combo for comparison (71mm F2.0).
As the small town was much less dense I found the extra reach of the TTartisans to be useful, and the DOF was shallow enough to be useful at distance, and the image was much cleaner across the frame compared to the Tak.


The Helios 44M was a different beast.  I felt like I was fighting with it basically the whole time and came back from the shoot thinking it was a bust and I'd wasted an outing.  The FOV often seemed wrong, it lacked the aperture to get enough light to the sensor and I was pushing the ISO a lot, the DOF was also deeper and so I found myself having to get closer to objects to get the separation I wanted, which then meant I was too close and the parallax motion from my hand-held movement was really distracting.  The focus on my copy is very stiff and it is a very low gear so to go from distance to closer focus had the ergonomics of opening a jar where something sticky had gotten into the threads.  
Still, I got back from the shoot and lots of the images looked really nice, which I think is to do with the extra diffusion this has.  It was also better behaved on the edges of the frame compared to the Tak too.



One thing that isn't obvious from the frame grabs is the ghosting from the strong light-sources in frame, and because I shoot hand-held and have IBIS active, they move in unnatural ways.  At first I thought they were coming from my vND but if anything they got worse on both the TTartisans and Helios after I took it off.
I think due to this I'll have to lean into the imperfections in the grade and edit and go lo-fi, which is why I've applied a film emulation softening equivalent to 20mm film to the Helios footage.
I also shot a lot with the iPhone 17 while there, normally during the day for non-cinema purposes, but that's a different topic for another time.

Back from a visit to Japan.
We spent most of the time in a small town but went to Tokyo for a weekend, so I shot a lot in Tokyo and used the rest of the time to test a range of lenses I took just for that purpose.
I tested the 12-35mm F2.8 for Night Cinema and it worked great and I loved the images, but as it got darker I kept cranking up the ISO and in the end it just didn't have the levels for the truly dark backstreets.


I also tested the tiny 35mm F1.6 c-mount CCTV lens I got off ebay some time ago.  It produced some really nice images in the right scenarios, but the plane of focus was so incredibly distorted that any scene with stuff off-centre in the frame would look really strange.
It had more level than the 12-35mm but still fell short of my better options.



My themes for the place emerged very quickly....   vending machines, bicycles, and lanterns.  Anyone who has been to Japan will be surprised by this exactly zero percent.
At this point we went to Tokyo and I treated it like a Night Cinema interval event, basically shooting as much as I could.
I shot a whole sequence from the hotel window as the sun set using the Takumar 50mm F1.4 and SB, my go-to setup.




I did a number of walks around the local area with the same setup.  Each time I went out I liked using the setup more, and each time I reviewed the files I liked the images I got from it more as well.  After China I was feeling like it was a bit too vintage / low-fi but I've really warmed to it since.



I found myself a bit at odds with Japanese culture, especially in regards to the fervent dislike of badly-behaved foreigners and the locals dislike for being filmed in public (despite the fact no-one will tell you they don't like it), so I mostly filmed the place and not the people, or at least I didn't tend to film individual people, instead including them small in the frame, or en-mass, or out of focus.
I think that lent itself to the cultural experience as well.  The city, and to many extents the culture, dwarfs the individual, placing the focus on the group.  As a tourist I can only glimpse the culture from afar, so taking the perspective of the outsider in the compositions is very much representative of the experience.





My "big" outing was a walk from Shibuya to Harajuku on our last night there.  As these places are known for youth and fashion and culture (and the counter-culture that fashion normally draws from) I concentrated on the grittier side of these areas.  I also leaned into the layers and the overall chaos of the place, taking advantage of the Takumars ability to focus on a small slice of the chaos, both through the 70mm FOV and also the shallow DOF.




Back in the small town I did more "test" walks with the TTartisans 50mm F1.2 (100mm F2.4 equivalent), the Helios 44M + SB combo (82mm F2.8 equivalent) and Takumar + SB combo for comparison (71mm F2.0).
As the small town was much less dense I found the extra reach of the TTartisans to be useful, and the DOF was shallow enough to be useful at distance, and the image was much cleaner across the frame compared to the Tak.


The Helios 44M was a different beast.  I felt like I was fighting with it basically the whole time and came back from the shoot thinking it was a bust and I'd wasted an outing.  The FOV often seemed wrong, it lacked the aperture to get enough light to the sensor and I was pushing the ISO a lot, the DOF was also deeper and so I found myself having to get closer to objects to get the separation I wanted, which then meant I was too close and the parallax motion from my hand-held movement was really distracting.  The focus on my copy is very stiff and it is a very low gear so to go from distance to closer focus had the ergonomics of opening a jar where something sticky had gotten into the threads.  
Still, I got back from the shoot and lots of the images looked really nice, which I think is to do with the extra diffusion this has.  It was also better behaved on the edges of the frame compared to the Tak too.



One thing that isn't obvious from the frame grabs is the ghosting from the strong light-sources in frame, and because I shoot hand-held and have IBIS active, they move in unnatural ways.  At first I thought they were coming from my vND but if anything they got worse on both the TTartisans and Helios after I took it off.
I think due to this I'll have to lean into the imperfections in the grade and edit and go lo-fi, which is why I've applied a film emulation softening equivalent to 20mm film to the Helios footage.
I also shot a lot with the iPhone 17 while there, normally during the day for non-cinema purposes, but that's a different topic for another time.

No doubt.  I have a 5DMII that I think still delivers in this regard as well.
What I have is good enough for me, so I've decide, "Eh, I'll stay where I'm at."
(for now) 😉

I'd add IBIS upgrades to Kye's list of improvements - as I normally shoot handheld, that's been my main reason to upgrade my M43 cameras over the years. I still own an original G9 (derived from the GH5), but the Oly E-M1 iii and OM-1 I bought more recently have better IBIS.
Although I've been a faithful M43 user for about 15 years (starting with a Pana G3), due to the lack of a modern video-orientated small M43 camera I ventured into full-frame with an S9 recently (when the price dropped a lot). Now I've had enough time to get used to it, I have to say the video quality from it is noticeably better than the M43 cameras I own - it seems to have a 'richness' that is attractive. I usually put a Smallrig leather half-case and Sigma 18-50 F2.8 APS-C lens on it, and it's great as a run-and-gun camera (even though it's only using about half the sensor area in APS-C mode).

This is a real thing and a very good point.
To give a personal and recent example, I was asked on Thursday of last week to jump in at the last minute to help finish someone's feature over the weekend.  I'm not sure of the details for why their DP became unavailable. The filmmaker had a shot list for Saturday that was 15 pages long taking place in 7 different locations - and both I and the other guy they brought in had a hard out at 4 or 5 in the afternoon.  Sunday's agenda was similar, but without either of us needing to leave.  We didn't finish the list for either day.  Likely, we'll be shooting again next Saturday.
It was all outdoors in parks, usually a several hundred meters from our cars.  None of our usual suspect gaffers were available/handy.  We had basically 0 time to light things and the director wanted a bunch of wides and tracking shots (both tend to take longer to light).  Controlling the light in any meaningful way was not a realistic option.  These are exactly the situations when an extra stop of dynamic range is nice to have to keep the sky at least a bit blue, but yet also still have some detail in some of the harsh shadows.
Real tough situation for the filmmaker - they definitely want to keep quality high and have they great ideas, but there are also budgetary and delivery date realities - the difference between a real indie film set and a reddit comments section.  😉
(Also, RIP colorist - there are like 5-6 different color profiles in play across all of the cameras that were used between the original DP and both of us last weekend, hopefully they only have to match 2 or 3 within any given scene)
I'm not sure what ASA 50 has to do with needing extra light on a sunny day.  Assuming ~24 fps, that'd give a proper exposure at approximately F/16 in bright sunlight (1/48 second for 180 shutter + sunny 16 rule indicating a 1/50 shutter speed = close enough)  and you'd still need to use ND to open up the aperture beyond that.  I suspect those lights are for filling in the faces/front of talent in a wide, given that the sun is actually at about a 60-90 degree angle from the lights (judging by shadows).  From where the cameras are pointed, the subjects will be backlit.

The GH5 has been my workhorse for almost a decade now.  For whatever reason, the need to move on from it has never been necessary, so I've stuck with it.  For instance, AF is not an issue.  Manual focus is how lenses get used by me.  Slow-mo is a thing to do less of, not more of, imo.
A full 10 years on, what does a different camera offer; like really offer?  An extra stop of exposure?  An extra bit of DR?  
Looking at a GH7 the thought is, "MMM, pretty nice."  But then what?  A big difference in ... what ... gets captured?  Maybe the market has matured TOO much for me?

You'd think so, but no!  If you're using like an f/1.2 lens, you can have surprisingly big dust spots on your sensor and never be any the wiser.  The more stopped down, the more they appear.  From what I remember, and I might be wrong about this, it's bascally the same effect as using a large diffuse light source vs a small point source - put your hand next to a white card near the large diffuse source and you'll get a blurry, indistinct shadow.  Do the same with a small point source and you'll get a well-defined crisp shadow.  It's the same on a smaller scale with sensor dust.

Well, I appreciate the mental exercises you're putting yourself through.  The questions are interesting.  Still, at the end of the day everyone's process is a bit different.  Since arts and crafts are subjective, quantifying how those two things merge is only useful up to a point, imo.  And, of course, that point is usually wildly different for all of us doing this stuff.
I'd ask, do you really wanna chase what that means?  It might always be ephemeral as context changes; slipping out of reach.  And shouldn't such meaning remain in the realm of intuition anyway? 
Then again, maybe not.  At least not for everybody. 
Perhaps being in a space without firm answers isn't interesting to you?  Maybe striving for technical contentment at the limits of understanding is the thing you enjoy.  That's cool too.  Engineering can be artful in it's own way as well.
Either way, keep poking around.

Good write up!
I've run the gauntlet as well.  My conclusion is that what you wrote above is the thing that'll get me through, so I accept it.  And why not?

For those interested in small setups, in modestly priced gear, in non-clinical rendering of images, in very fast lenses, in vintage lenses, or older equipment, we exist in a space that has no quantitative reference.  There are no numbers to look up and understand things from.
It applies to the equipment:
Questions like "how sharp is that lens?" don't have an answer (that is intuitive anyway - MTF charts aren't intuitive and often aren't reliable or even available).  Even if it did, that answer would only be true at one aperture setting, and even then, is only true for the middle of the frame or the edge of the frame, but not both at the same time.
If we shoot at base ISO with a 4K camera then we'll likely get an image with roughly 4K resolution, but at higher ISOs the effective resolution will likely drop due to ISO noise, NR, compression, etc.
If we use filtration, like diffusion filters, then these lower the effective resolution of the image.  It's literally what they're designed to do.  How much do they do this though?  Not only is there no published answer to this, but the answer changes depending on focal length, sensor size, etc.
It applies to the look we're creating:
Any colourist working creatively will be trying to create an image with the right amount of resolution / sharpness / noise / etc, not just "the sharpest" or "the highest resolution".  How much is desired?  What are the references?
I've been struggling with many questions from my own equipment and projects, including:
My TTartisans 17mm F1.4 is less than half the weight of my Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95, but the TT is quite soft at F1.4.  How soft is it though?  Is it too soft? If I want to shoot low-light with the GX85 (which has terrible higher-ISO NR) then what ISO setting is too soft, and then which lenses do I need to use in which environments to get enough light into the sensor? My Takumar 50mm F1.4 on my generic M42-MFT speed booster has pretty soft edges, but how soft? You'd think the solution to these would be to look at the footage and decide, but (for me at least) it's a double-edged sword because I also don't know what final images I want!  I have spent a good amount of time looking at Hollywood films and big budget TV shows (see the original The Aesthetic thread) but apart from just going "I like that" and "I don't like that" we have the problem once-again of there being no way to quantify things.  Saying "this show is softer than that show" really doesn't help.
My solution is to reference things back to film.
I originally did this with my Panasonic GF3, which shoots 1080p so soft you could cut it with a wet noodle, by comparing it to the presets in the Film Look Creator tool for 8mm and 16mm film I concluded that when the GF3 didn't show macro-blocking due to the (very low) bitrate, it was about the same as 8mm film.
This was actually a really useful reference for me, because the associations I have for 8mm and 16mm film are quite useful.  8mm film has an aesthetic that is very nostalgic and low-fi, but was never good enough for TV shows, let alone the cinema.
My new plan is to reference everything back to film, across quite a number of ways...
Texture, which is what I've talked about so far:
- I will be trying to "map" my lenses and cameras and codecs to a specific resolution of film (16mm, 35mm, somewhere in between)
- I will be trying to "map" my aesthetic preferences to film too, like wanting a certain project to have the resolution of 16mm for example, but further than this - the size and amount of grain can also be a useful reference.  These are useful references for me because a lot of the aesthetic references of cinema I have were actually shot on film and so by associating these things back to film it's a relevant reference, not just some arbitrary scale that isn't directly related.
Dynamic Range and Contrast:
- How does the DR from the GX85 look when put through an image pipeline in Resolve compare to the contrast of a 250D -> 2383 process?
- What about the iPhone vs a 16mm process from the 90s?  or a B&W process from the Italian Neorealism or French New Wave period?
Contrast and DR should be relatively easy to match to various film stocks by just shooting some over/under exposure tests and adjusting my standard Resolve colour pipeline to match what is in the spec sheets.
Speaking of spec sheets, not only do the spec sheets for motion picture film contain the Sensitometric Curves that show DR and contrast, but they also contain the MTF curves too as a reference for resolution.  When it comes to resolution you don't need to look at the charts though - I asked some film geeks I know to comment on the FLC presets and they said that the 8mm / 16mm / 35mm presets in the Grain panel have about the right amount of image softness and amount of grain (but that the character of the grain isn't accurate), so the FLC is a reasonable reference for the texture of film in a very broad sense.
What else?  
Image stability is another one.  8mm film cameras were larger than modern compact cameras so were more stable with the lenses they were normally fitted with, but 8mm had pretty terrible gate weave (alignment from one frame to the next) so having micro-jitters from hand-holding is compatible with the look.  Whereas 16mm would have had more mass and less gate weave but at least at first would have probably been shoulder mounted or on a tripod, so some types of shots / angles will be more compatible with the aesthetic than others.
Depth of field is another one.  Lots of people think the "Super 16mm look" just means deep DOF, but it's more nuanced than that, as the lenses typically used would have some separation in low-light when focused closer, but due to the lenses at the time the shots might have been softer wide-open, so that's another relationship to understand.
There are lots of other parameters that make an image that aren't covered here, but I am finding that getting some kind of reference for texture and contrast fills a very large gap in the landscape for me.  
The goal isn't to accurately emulate anything, its to develop a keener understanding of the spectrum these things exist in.
Where I'm hoping to get to is to be able to develop summaries like:
The GF3 is about 8mm at base-ISO, which during the day is equivalent to <some particular F-stop>, so I can put basically any lens sharper than 8mm onto it and the result will still look like 8mm.  I can hand-hold this tiny camera with an acceptable level of shake up to about Xmm and it'll still fit the 8mm vintage / amateur / nostalgic vibe.  The GF3 is tiny but once you add a lens that is larger than a pancake then I may as well use the GX85, so the only sensible lens is the 15mm F8 bodycap lens.  Any other combo doesn't make sense.
(This is an actual example I've worked out through testing).
  The GX85 at base-ISO is equivalent to <film size of some kind.. 16mm? 24mm? 35mm? 50mm?> which requires lenses of <F-stop> during the day and <F-stop> in well-lit night environments.  This amount of resolution is suitable for projects with a vibe of <gritty street? vintage? night cinema? high-end commercials? etc?> but not other vibes.
(This is still yet to be tested, but once I've worked out the camera then certain lens combinations will reveal themselves to make sense and others will obviously not work)
  iPhone?  Where does it sit in all this?  It has huge resolution and very strong codecs (4K Prores HQ or even Prores RAW) but poor DR and even worse ISO performance.
  GH7.  What are the aesthetics I want to create that I can't create with the above (because the above is too limiting).  What lenses and shooting styles and approaches are required for these aesthetics? The ultimate thinking is developing "constellations" where there is compatibility / alignment between: a camera, one or more lenses, certain shooting situations and techniques, an image pipeline, and a target aesthetic.  I've been working on finding these "constellations" by starting at the camera and working forwards, but also by starting with the end aesthetic and working backwards, and I've identified a number of partial matches, but I think that by relating everything back to motion picture film, I can make more progress fitting the pieces together.

For those interested in small setups, in modestly priced gear, in non-clinical rendering of images, in very fast lenses, in vintage lenses, or older equipment, we exist in a space that has no quantitative reference.  There are no numbers to look up and understand things from.
It applies to the equipment:
Questions like "how sharp is that lens?" don't have an answer (that is intuitive anyway - MTF charts aren't intuitive and often aren't reliable or even available).  Even if it did, that answer would only be true at one aperture setting, and even then, is only true for the middle of the frame or the edge of the frame, but not both at the same time.
If we shoot at base ISO with a 4K camera then we'll likely get an image with roughly 4K resolution, but at higher ISOs the effective resolution will likely drop due to ISO noise, NR, compression, etc.
If we use filtration, like diffusion filters, then these lower the effective resolution of the image.  It's literally what they're designed to do.  How much do they do this though?  Not only is there no published answer to this, but the answer changes depending on focal length, sensor size, etc.
It applies to the look we're creating:
Any colourist working creatively will be trying to create an image with the right amount of resolution / sharpness / noise / etc, not just "the sharpest" or "the highest resolution".  How much is desired?  What are the references?
I've been struggling with many questions from my own equipment and projects, including:
My TTartisans 17mm F1.4 is less than half the weight of my Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95, but the TT is quite soft at F1.4.  How soft is it though?  Is it too soft? If I want to shoot low-light with the GX85 (which has terrible higher-ISO NR) then what ISO setting is too soft, and then which lenses do I need to use in which environments to get enough light into the sensor? My Takumar 50mm F1.4 on my generic M42-MFT speed booster has pretty soft edges, but how soft? You'd think the solution to these would be to look at the footage and decide, but (for me at least) it's a double-edged sword because I also don't know what final images I want!  I have spent a good amount of time looking at Hollywood films and big budget TV shows (see the original The Aesthetic thread) but apart from just going "I like that" and "I don't like that" we have the problem once-again of there being no way to quantify things.  Saying "this show is softer than that show" really doesn't help.
My solution is to reference things back to film.
I originally did this with my Panasonic GF3, which shoots 1080p so soft you could cut it with a wet noodle, by comparing it to the presets in the Film Look Creator tool for 8mm and 16mm film I concluded that when the GF3 didn't show macro-blocking due to the (very low) bitrate, it was about the same as 8mm film.
This was actually a really useful reference for me, because the associations I have for 8mm and 16mm film are quite useful.  8mm film has an aesthetic that is very nostalgic and low-fi, but was never good enough for TV shows, let alone the cinema.
My new plan is to reference everything back to film, across quite a number of ways...
Texture, which is what I've talked about so far:
- I will be trying to "map" my lenses and cameras and codecs to a specific resolution of film (16mm, 35mm, somewhere in between)
- I will be trying to "map" my aesthetic preferences to film too, like wanting a certain project to have the resolution of 16mm for example, but further than this - the size and amount of grain can also be a useful reference.  These are useful references for me because a lot of the aesthetic references of cinema I have were actually shot on film and so by associating these things back to film it's a relevant reference, not just some arbitrary scale that isn't directly related.
Dynamic Range and Contrast:
- How does the DR from the GX85 look when put through an image pipeline in Resolve compare to the contrast of a 250D -> 2383 process?
- What about the iPhone vs a 16mm process from the 90s?  or a B&W process from the Italian Neorealism or French New Wave period?
Contrast and DR should be relatively easy to match to various film stocks by just shooting some over/under exposure tests and adjusting my standard Resolve colour pipeline to match what is in the spec sheets.
Speaking of spec sheets, not only do the spec sheets for motion picture film contain the Sensitometric Curves that show DR and contrast, but they also contain the MTF curves too as a reference for resolution.  When it comes to resolution you don't need to look at the charts though - I asked some film geeks I know to comment on the FLC presets and they said that the 8mm / 16mm / 35mm presets in the Grain panel have about the right amount of image softness and amount of grain (but that the character of the grain isn't accurate), so the FLC is a reasonable reference for the texture of film in a very broad sense.
What else?  
Image stability is another one.  8mm film cameras were larger than modern compact cameras so were more stable with the lenses they were normally fitted with, but 8mm had pretty terrible gate weave (alignment from one frame to the next) so having micro-jitters from hand-holding is compatible with the look.  Whereas 16mm would have had more mass and less gate weave but at least at first would have probably been shoulder mounted or on a tripod, so some types of shots / angles will be more compatible with the aesthetic than others.
Depth of field is another one.  Lots of people think the "Super 16mm look" just means deep DOF, but it's more nuanced than that, as the lenses typically used would have some separation in low-light when focused closer, but due to the lenses at the time the shots might have been softer wide-open, so that's another relationship to understand.
There are lots of other parameters that make an image that aren't covered here, but I am finding that getting some kind of reference for texture and contrast fills a very large gap in the landscape for me.  
The goal isn't to accurately emulate anything, its to develop a keener understanding of the spectrum these things exist in.
Where I'm hoping to get to is to be able to develop summaries like:
The GF3 is about 8mm at base-ISO, which during the day is equivalent to <some particular F-stop>, so I can put basically any lens sharper than 8mm onto it and the result will still look like 8mm.  I can hand-hold this tiny camera with an acceptable level of shake up to about Xmm and it'll still fit the 8mm vintage / amateur / nostalgic vibe.  The GF3 is tiny but once you add a lens that is larger than a pancake then I may as well use the GX85, so the only sensible lens is the 15mm F8 bodycap lens.  Any other combo doesn't make sense.
(This is an actual example I've worked out through testing).
  The GX85 at base-ISO is equivalent to <film size of some kind.. 16mm? 24mm? 35mm? 50mm?> which requires lenses of <F-stop> during the day and <F-stop> in well-lit night environments.  This amount of resolution is suitable for projects with a vibe of <gritty street? vintage? night cinema? high-end commercials? etc?> but not other vibes.
(This is still yet to be tested, but once I've worked out the camera then certain lens combinations will reveal themselves to make sense and others will obviously not work)
  iPhone?  Where does it sit in all this?  It has huge resolution and very strong codecs (4K Prores HQ or even Prores RAW) but poor DR and even worse ISO performance.
  GH7.  What are the aesthetics I want to create that I can't create with the above (because the above is too limiting).  What lenses and shooting styles and approaches are required for these aesthetics? The ultimate thinking is developing "constellations" where there is compatibility / alignment between: a camera, one or more lenses, certain shooting situations and techniques, an image pipeline, and a target aesthetic.  I've been working on finding these "constellations" by starting at the camera and working forwards, but also by starting with the end aesthetic and working backwards, and I've identified a number of partial matches, but I think that by relating everything back to motion picture film, I can make more progress fitting the pieces together.

This is why, for me, there are two likely ways to use it:
1) My small bag full of C-mount and D-mount lenses and possibly attach it to the smallest 5" monitor that I have (which is quite small)
2) Throw it in my bag where it takes up almost no space and attach it to the back of existing short telephoto lenses which now function like long telephoto lenses

There's a realisation I keep hitting in my setups, despite me trying to keep a small kit.  It goes like this:
Start with a small camera body Think about the lenses I'd use with it for that project Think about the shooting style and approach and think about extra rigging and accessories that would require
----<realisation occurs>---- If the setup is going to be that big - why not use a larger body with better features / quality I'm having that realisation with this GoPro.
Not that there's a ton of small bodies with 10-bit recording, which we've all complained about at great length, but just having a camera body with more than 3 buttons and a screen that is larger than a postage stamp etc is actually quite useful.

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Getting good affordable 960p would be cool for lots of people.  I see the science explainer channels showing bad quality 960p and the richer channels with Chronos setups.
Don't get me wrong about them not being cameras that appeal to a large number of people.  They're very good for getting the new "EVERYTHING IS AWESOME AND WIDE AND SMOOTH AND DEFINITELY SHARP SHARP SHARP!!!!" style of video that looks more like video than anything ever made before, but as soon as they say it's a cinema camera, there are 27 things they have to change from every other model ever made, and to bet they'll get every single one of them right is a very long shot indeed.

Matt, that half-cropped head makes it even funnier.
@kye great post! ; )
:- )

There's a colleague in my town that is trying to make "animation" films with 100% generative A.I.  What would Francis conclude about someone working without 'hands' and 'head'?  Or at best, no hands and half their head.
Like Gerald, this colleague is hoping he's able to maintain a financially rewarding YouTube channel. 
It could be that he is jumping on the slop-train.  But, on the other hand, at least he's making a novel effort production-wise to try and pay his bills.
Whereas, my naive thinking is that there's still a chance my documentaries will be, somehow, someway, financially rewarding.  And, even though that's unlikely, making docs is at least creatively fulfilling.

When I was learning calligraphy, an Arabic one, wich is very hard to learn and needs a specialized pen, my mentor used to say to us "an artist can write perfectly even with matchsticks, don't be obsessed with pens". Later on I realized he has an expensive collection of pens, from cheap ones to exotic ones, old and new, and in all possible sizes. He wasn't obsessed with gear. You could give him a philips screwdriver and leftover construction paint and he could manage to write a poem with that on a wooden pallet. But he also had a passion for gears, because pen is something that connects him to the art he loves. 

I heard this recently and think it's pretty interesting.  I'm not sure if it's the best definition I've read, but it's more practical than other ones, so is useful from that perspective.
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
- Saint Francis of Assisi
I'm 100% for not gatekeeping.  Even from a practical perspective, saying someone/something is or isn't 'art' doesn't mean anything, and people who like to be critical are really just telling us about themselves, not the thing they're talking about.

I heard this recently and think it's pretty interesting.  I'm not sure if it's the best definition I've read, but it's more practical than other ones, so is useful from that perspective.
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
- Saint Francis of Assisi
I'm 100% for not gatekeeping.  Even from a practical perspective, saying someone/something is or isn't 'art' doesn't mean anything, and people who like to be critical are really just telling us about themselves, not the thing they're talking about.