Lenses

[PannySVHS]

Lovely writeup, video and edit. @kye Lenscap lens, now that's an idea I like for the GM5. But I was going to sell it or was I?:) I still got an old Oly Epl1  with that super lowres and dim screen. Now that would be a great prospect for the lenscap. It's built like a tank and AF is the worst of any mft camera.:)

[kye]

7 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Lovely writeup, video and edit. @kye Lenscap lens, now that's an idea I like for the GM5. But I was going to sell it or was I?:) I still got an old Oly Epl1  with that super lowres and dim screen. Now that would be a great prospect for the lenscap. It's built like a tank and AF is the worst of any mft camera.:)

Yes, it's the AF that makes me think of manual lenses on the GF3.  For stills it's a fully featured camera, but for video it's auto-everything* and so having an AF lens on it is a pain because the CDAF will hunt occasionally.
(* actually I recorded some clips with it last night and discovered it keeps the current WB setting - how odd that's the only thing it will let you lock down!)

If you don't already own the Olympus body cap lens then perhaps the "7Artisans 18mm f/6.3 Mark II" might be a better choice as it's cheaper and faster than the Olympus. 

[eatstoomuchjam]

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!

[kye]

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.

[eatstoomuchjam]

38 minutes ago, kye said:

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.

 

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.

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

50 minutes ago, kye said:

anything that is quite far away suffers from heat haze anyway, so the sharpness of the air is the limiting factor.

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.

52 minutes ago, kye said:

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

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?

 

[kye]

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!

[eatstoomuchjam]

53 minutes ago, kye said:

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

 

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.

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. 

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.

57 minutes ago, kye said:

Maybe you should rent an MFT system?

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)

57 minutes ago, kye said:

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.

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.

[kye]

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!