New travel film-making setup and pipeline - I feel like the tech has finally come of age

[BTM_Pix]

2 hours ago, kye said:

I'd imagine that @BTM_Pix would be deep down this rabbit hole..

https://fotodioxpro.com/products/fltr-spy?srsltid=AfmBOorgYN_vx9pKJxxTg1DIdSUlKXOxH46m5QoEa0-ggy5WdjZGQmhq

[eatstoomuchjam]

6 hours ago, kye said:

Yes, lots of things to trade-off against each other.  Thus the arguments about what is best when people impose their own values and priorities onto other people then judge them for doing it "wrong" lol.  The more I refine my setup the more that other peoples approaches sound so alien to me.

The only setup that's truly "wrong" is one that you don't enjoy using and that doesn't get you the photos that you want.  The primary camera of a friend of mine is a pinhole that she made herself from... I think it's a coffee can or a cocoa powder jar.  The photos are low-resolution, dreamy, and perfect.  My setup would be totally wrong for her, or you, but I quite like it!  I was at Photostock a few years ago when David Burnett was the speaker - he is famously still shooting sporting events and major political events using either a speed graphic or converted Graflex SLR with an Aero Ektar.  At that event, however, he was carrying the camera he uses most of the time - an A7c with a small Sony lens.  Not a setup that I'd choose, but if it's good enough for one of the most famous living photographers, it's probably not "wrong."  😅

5 hours ago, kye said:

If my goal is to make edits that feel more immersive, then it makes sense to shoot with a lens that's roughly "normal" so it has a perspective similar to the human eye, which is about 50mm on FF.

A number of the big name classic cinematographers/filmmakers favored lenses between 40-60mm or so FF equivalent.  A lot of classic street photographers like 35-50mm because it's seen as immersive.  But if you want an outsider perspective, your choice of a 70mm seems appropriate!

[Aussie Ash]

don't draw attention to the camera !

 

[kye]

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.

[Clark Nikolai]

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.

 

[kye]

On 5/6/2026 at 9:59 PM, Clark Nikolai said:

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.

Thanks!

Partly I feel like I've moved past shooting the obvious stuff and started focusing on what I'm looking for, but also there's a bias in what frames I choose to post online too as wider more normal shots often look really cool when moving but as soon as you look at just one frame as a still image all the movement is gone and the depth collapses and the frame just looks like a chaotic mess.  This happens even if you've been looking at it in motion and so your brain already has a 3D mental model of what it's looking at - you hit stop and it just collapses.

This shot is a moderate example and looks like a very busy but confusing still image (taken right next to the Shibuya train station):

When watching the video clip the train stands out most because it's moving quickly, the pedestrians on the bottom right are moving a lot and the ones in the distance and to the left are moving less but still moving, and the side of the rail bridge and buildings in the rear are completely still.  Seeing these things your brain instantly builds a sense of depth, which combined with the rear of the signs then means you recognise the cars as being several lanes of traffic despite it being almost completely stationary, and so in only a fraction of a second the frame becomes about six clearly-defined areas, rather than the almost indiscernible chaos that the still frame is.

The process of pulling nice looking frame grabs from my footage is a fascinating exercise in how different still images are from moving images.  They really are a completely different thing, and I shoot for motion and chaos and layers, so in a way I'm posting my least interesting shots.

On 5/6/2026 at 9:59 PM, Clark Nikolai said:

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.

I agree.  I follow someone on YT shooting with the same Takumar 50mm F1.4 on FF and they shot a video of using it wide open in daylight and it just didn't look right.

There are strong anatomical reasons for this as in lower light our pupils dilate giving our eyes a shallower DOF, we can often get flares etc from strong light sources (which will be on our periphery because we're probably not looking at them directly), and in very low light we even start relying on the rods in our eyes (which are far less detailed) instead of the cones which we usually use.

I have a trip later on in the year where I will probably only be shooting during the day and won't have many/any chances to go off shooting at night, so I'm forcing myself to get excited about daytime images again, and in thinking about equipment I'm not sure that shooting with larger apertures / fast lenses makes visual sense so I might not even take any, instead just using my usual 14-140mm zoom lens.