Cinegain

Well, that's weirdly... interesting. Hum. Not sure if I can see myself shooting like this though: On a very unrelated note... am I the only one that gets a hint of the Contax T3 vibe when seeing this thing? Man, with Ricoh seeminly unwilling to release a proper new compact sub-$1k streetshooter with Contax flair... maybe Sony can? Or even better, one that runs on film! Like Fujifilm once did with the Fujifilm Klasse S & W (one of the very last generations iconic compact film cameras).

Good share, thanks! I've heard good things before of: http://www.onestop-digital.com (HK, and there's a VAT free guarantee for some countries, check the FAQ). Bought my Leica 15mm f/1.7 at eglobalcentral. Had always been wary of them popping up in my Google Shopping results for dirtcheap, seemed fishy at first! But they sure delivered, both figuratively as literally!

That's a dang good price on the 40-150mm f/2.8 PRO that is. I've ordered one with the teleconverter for under a thousand bucks after a price alarm from Geizhals for an item on Amazon (-33%). But... sorta has 'bogus' written all over it and hasn't shipped out. Grmph. Was eyeballing that sucker for the longest while, would compliment the 7-14 and 12-40 superbly. The super travel kit. Oh well...

Ah, I see, not bad! The GH5 with the Leica runs as daily deal (£2,036.03) on UKDigital.

And... I just ordered the GH5! It sounds amazeballs. Tip for our European mainlanders: for the next 3 days still there's a special promotion surrounding GH5 purchases (ends Sep 3th). It's open to customers from the EEA (European Economic Area), provided the order has been placed with a participating UK retailer. You get: 5 year warranty claim at Panasonic UK & up to 200 GBP bonus (£100 when ordering body only, £150 Lumix kit, £200 Leica kit) in addition to the quote for any trade-in compact system camera or DSLR you might have (request a quote to find out what your old camera is still worth). Valid at all the big guys, CVP, Wex, Park, UKDigital, etc. It's already extra tempting to buy from the UK these days already due to present GBP VS EUR rates, but this is a nice extra push. E.g. https://geizhals.eu/panasonic-lumix-dc-gh5-schwarz-mit-objektiv-dg-vario-elmarit-12-60mm-2-8-4-0-asph-dmc-gh5l-a1558095.html?hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&hloc=uk&hloc=eu I could locally get one from 2549 EUR. As per Geizhals results: Wex: £ 2199 -> € 2382,18. Already cheaper by a fair margin. Take those bonus £200 off and you're effectively paying 1999 GBP -> 2168.72 EUR. That's roughly the price of the Lumix 12-60mm kit, but you get the Leica lens (which you can either keep or sell to make the GH5 even more cheaper)! Just thought I should share. Of course you'd need an old body to spare and they do need to resell it with a bit of a margin for them, so it's no jackpot there (but the bonus is!).

From an earlier discussion: So I'd take the tip in Andrew's article to heart. Take the fastest cards SanDisk have to offer, they should work fine. But no guarantee as for some reason they don't have the officlal V-classification label. I sorta question the high capacity 256GB ADATA compared to the other V90 cards as well as those mentioned V60 cards with only W100.

Hum, interesting... ~ http://www.ebay.com/itm/Set-6-soviet-anamorphic-flare-prime-lens-for-35mm-movie-cine-Canon-EOS-amber-/302425231530 ~ https://www.facebook.com/Ironglassadapters/posts/274344229747868 ~ http://ironglassadapters.com

- Not sure where to put this, but here seems about appropriate. - I just came across the Lilliput A7S 4K... and, it's actually a really rather intriguing low budget monitor (apart from not being more compact than 7")... http://lilliputweb.net/new-products/a7s.html https://lilliputdirect.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=779 http://www.lilliputuk.com/monitors/open-frame/7-monitors-2/OF-A7S/ http://www.linkdelight.com/P0041431-Lilliput-A7S-4K-1920X1200-HDMI-Input-Output-On-Camera-Monitor.html Amazon ( https://www.amazon.de/Lilliput-1920x1200-Feldmonitor-Mirrorless-Panasonic/dp/B074SGNC2X ) puts its first appearance at 2 weeks ago. Must've snuck by me, because I haven't seen any promotion/articles or anything regarding this puppy. But a 7"-er with advanced monitoring features that takes a 4K signal... for a Linkdelight price of 149 USD, doesn't sound too bad at all... dare I say almost unheard of at this pricepoint? Thought I should share, so... there ya go.

Yeah, my phone has a higher resolution than my laptop (or beamer). Just, when a friend got his QHD+ or something display a few years ago, everything on the screen was just too damn small and that scaling of icons/text was a little besides the point and didn't work quite well (even Adobe software back then didn't scale up)... made me commit to native 1080p. High res also made the GPU work a lot harder, more stress on the system, slower, fan noise. Maybe things are better implemented for 4K these days, but yeah, using a large high res external monitor might be a good move to make.

Getting one is not really any new development. I was one of the launchday pre-orders, I can really appreciate what it's about. Just had a bit of hassle with the logistics of it all, but everything should be set now. Pretty mean alternative to the Oly beast that is the 7-14mm f/2.8 PRO (not small, nimble & light, no filter thread) if you ask me. And you're right of course, for me the f/2 end of the spectrum makes it both useful in lower light situations and giving you interesting depth of field for the angle with fairly close subjects in focus. Of course... on a sunny day, you gotta need to add filters or it's bye bye aperture.

Look at Formula 1 drivers. Usually they're starting out picking up daddy's interest/legacy. Their environment enables them to get into it at a young age, to start with karting and progress to the big leagues. It's about showing interest, having the environment and possibilities to pursue said interest and put it the time and dedication to learn and gain experience in that field. A big part of one's personality or ability is upbringing. And especially at a younger age you're an easy learner, same for languages or picking up stuff like skateboarding. That said, if your interest is with video games rather than playing the piano... more likely you'll be better at the stuff that you're actually interested in. And you might want to play tennis... but it can actually be that you just naturally aren't very gifted at it somehow, it just doesn't come as second nature. Some people's brains are just wired differently, we have different aspirations and abilities that do set us apart. Wanting something alone isn't good enough... it's not a guarantee of it actually happening. But at lot is possible if you put your mind to it, that much is true. And like that kid that followed in his dad's footsteps... just make sure you have the environment and possibilities to grow and put in the time and get the experience to do just that. One step a day might appear insignificant, but you will have come quite the journey over time.

Small taste by Mr Emm. After finally sorting logistics, in meanwhile 'HK, Arrived at processing centre' (5 days ago) over here.

Like... your go-to snap away device for say in and around the house? For the longest time that was the LX100, but the GX80 with Leica 15mm f/1.7 or many other compact primes makes for a similar but better set-up, although you do miss having zoom flexibility in such a pocket shooter formfactor. For the times I actually go 'let's go out and shoot some' it has to be the G80. The GH4 due to lack of IBIS and worse noise performance mainly, hardly gets any use these days. BMPCC is just too much hassle on the go, so hasn't seen daylight much either (I can imagine however getting them up and running again if I manage some Russian acquaintances to organize me one or two S16 Zenit Optars). The G80 even makes me hardly use the E-M1 for stills anymore. I'd figured I would have the E-M1 Mark II and a GH5 around already, but I have not been tempted quite yet, though I guess it makes sense to get rid of some of the old to make way for the new. E-M1 Mark II actually sounds very promising as a hybrid shooter, but I don't want to run the 2 flagships this time around, made sense when the E-M1 killed it for stills and had IBIS, VS the GH4 without IBIS but more productive video features and of course 4K. Now both E-M1 Mark II and GH5 are fairly close. Deciding factor for me will be the 'summer' firmware update and a little bit of a price drop or other incentive (like a 12-35mm f/2.8 II bundle with 300 bucks off). So yeah. GX80 for small stuff. G80 for a bit more purposeful stuff. Huawei P10 Plus DualSIM with the Leica set-up of course otherwise.

You use the vectorscope and the skintone line for color correction. With grading, go about it however you want. Hollywood movies often have very stylistic skintones that aren't on the skintone line, ranging from gold orange to blue, green and washed out white. Tastewise I myself would be tempted to push it towards:

'photos and videos on music artists' without any form of stabilization... sounds like a challenge... Plus, any Sony, Nikon etc over the 80D for stills, I'd say.

Good point! His guides (as well as the color 'patches') give some good insight! Shoot with the ease of a Canon in a heartbeat. At the moment Wolfcrow has his out. Believe Caleb from DSLRVideoShooter is close to having his up. Not sure if Dave Dugdale is doing one. Can't rule out Neumannfilms, Griffin Hammond, etc doing one either, doesn't appear to be the case though.

GH5, no troubles with heat, rolling shutter is kept in check, tons of cool features, sweet battery life, cardslot is on the side and dual slot type, proper audio interface... ISO is now supposedly pretty solid up to ISO3200. Nice 'n grippy for handheld shooting; especially with the 5-axis B.I.S. and optional Dual I.S. (2.0). Vari-angle display with well-implemented touchscreen. Tons of compact native lenses as well, as you know. Keep it light and throw it on a gimbal. And... people seem to be enjoying it for stills as well, for which it also has numerous interesting features. Like, don't get me wrong, the pixel level results from the A6500 sensor are pretty great, like, the amount of dynamic range, level of detail, high ISO noise performance, really great stuff and all. But once you look beyond that, it really falls apart. The body is just rubbish. Like, Sony... c'mon, take notice, all other crop sensor mirrorless camera flagships are pretty nice bodies. GH5, E-M1 Mark II, X-T2, NX1, even the Canon EOS M5 for Pete's sake. But no, they went for a super cute small footprint camera, because that's what Sony envisions the people want. Btw, there's not other choice, there's just one model of this generation APS-C Sony mirrorless camera, atleast the other manufacturers are giving you the smaller ones as an option, not forcing you to go along with it. With flagship cameras you expect great things, but that's hard to realize when you've got only so little space to make it happen... so, chip infrastructure is baaaaddd. That's why you get massive rolling shitter. Heat dissipation is more or less non existent, leading to recording interruptions and camera shutdowns. They've come up with a 'solution': tripod mode! So basically you raise the threshold for overheat protection to kick in, that however renders your camera sooo friggin' hot, that you are no longer supposed to shoot handheld with it. I mean: c'mon son! Anyways, some people are willing to make that work or claim it's not that bad, all I know is: I can't just rely on it at any given time. But ok, we'll shut our eyes and pretend we didn't see anything. Still, the body is terrible. The cardslot is co-located at the battery compartment, you can't imagine how happy I was when the G80 had gotten a dedicated cardslot on the side, rather than the G7's one that's at the battery compartment as well. The battery itself is tiny and doesn't last very long, don't you just love changing batteries all the time? Yeah, well, me neither. There's no dedicated headphone jack for monitoring. It lacks a sizeable grip for comfortable holding. The screen flips, but not all the way up, nor is it of the vari-angle type that flips up from the side so you can still mount a mic on top and still see the screen. It's a touchscreen now, but the implementation is rather limited, you'd expect more from a manufacturer who's in the smartphone game (although, I'm not suprised they're not killing it, the new XZ1 for example looks amazing on paper... just like their cameras, in reallife... they just don't win you over). Like honestly, what were they thinking here. Back to the image, atleast that's alright, right? Well, like I said, tons of rolling shutter and especially color at its default settings is appaling... even generates color channel clipping. You can make it work, but it takes you a lot of tweaking... don't know about you, but I rather get stuff done than dicking around. That's why people love Canon so much, they're like the opposite of Sony. Don't care about innovation, about specs, how it looks on paper. They just want you to pick it up, shoot with it and find the results pleasing with the minimum effort that went into it. Their AF is on point, colors are pleasing right of the bat, light codec 1080p only on many of their cameras so NLE's slices through the footage like a hot knife through butter. But you know, for how long can you really ignore con-/prosumer need for 4K? Slowmo? Sensor stabilization? Vari-angle screens & mic-in port? Etc. So, you're kinda in between these two extremes. And with the Sony btw, lenses. Argh, their lens philosophy. For a good 3 years now their mirrorless lens line-up has been dead (if not taken into account big bulky expensive ENG/Cinestyle zooms), no development no releases whatsoever. At this point the APS-C E-mount cameras are entry level fullframe cameras for poor souls unable to afford the A7 line-up. Atleast with the A6x00 they can start building their fullframe lens collection and wait until they have enough money to upgrade. Don't know man, not cool! For me one of the main benefits of a crop sensor mirrorless body is the fact that the lenses are small, the body itself doesn't even matter all that much, but if you can keep lenses compact, you've found the secret to a compact system! Sony fails to embrace this. Another big no-no for me! It just all adds up... to something that's disappointing, but like, I was looking forward to the A6300 when rumors of it were leaked and it got closer and closer to launch, because I do like the APS-C performance, I think it's a sweetspot. You get a bit more dynamic range and are able to squeeze a little bit more juice out of the colors. High ISO lowlight noise performance is really respectable. Obviously the crop is less, so your options to go wide angle are better. It's easier to establish a shallow depth of field. All true. Like the occasional fullframe look? Throw on a focal reducer! Still, you have the option to keep lenses small... atleast, with those manufacturers that are willing to embrace that path. Like honestly, I'd probably pick the APS-C Fujifilm X-T2 instead (there were rumors of a videocentric X-T2s, but it has been pretty quiet for a couple of weeks now I believe) or the good ol' Samsung NX1, though, that one really doesn't cope very well at high ISO either. Both the Fuji and Samsung have a bit similar issues that make 'em less appealing. First is the less flexible lens mount option, with no electronic adapters either. No sensor stabilization is a biggie for me. And no vari-angle screen, plus the X-T2 isn't touch sensitive either. To me both Panasonic GH5 and Olympus E-M1 Mark II are what mirrorless crop sensor bodies should be all about. Like, there's hardly anything bad to say for them. You might only be able to 'blame' them for not having APS-C/FF sensor performance. But if that otherwise gives you everything you could ever dream of wanting and be compact at that as well... it's easy to find ways to make it work out just fine. So until someone comes up with something like the GH5 in terms of body and features and throws in an APS-C sensor, for me: Micro Four Thirds it is.

E-M10 Mark III is about just as exciting.

Go native? The Olympus 60mm f/2.8 Macro for example is pretty legendary. Both them and Panasonic have 30mm's as well. You can also get like e.g. Fotga electronic macro tubes. Works pretty great with the Panasonic 42.5mm f/1.7 for example. Olympus Visionary Frank Rückert enters the weekly roundup over at 43rumors regularly, his work is ballin'! https://www.flickr.com/photos/79183799@N04/ / http://pen3.de .

Get this, with the amazing 17-35, 28-70 & 80-200mm f/2.8 ED and you're pretty much set! Maybe the 28mm f/2.8 and 2 or so more sensitive primes for good measurement. It's just... no way to keep a set-up like that nice 'n compact. That's one side to DSLRs and fullframe that really blows. Also don't really like the liveview experiences on those (atleast the pro bodies feature a tripod mode where you can enable contrast based AF only, this stops the mirror from flipping around crazily like on the D5300 when used in liveview) and OVF means you need to use the LCD with a loupe rather than the VF it's equipped with. No sensor stabilization... Nikon is the least flexible mount... but! That sensor performance and the whole beefy ergonomics and sturdy build! It does kick ass and Nikon always pulls such organic looking stuff from the sensors, I really like the look. Just sorta wished they were into FF/APS-C mirrorless already (for me preferably APS-C actually, you could have a line of more compact lenses and you can still speedboost APS-C towards FF with 35mm lenses, should you feel like it sometimea), I'd really appreciate the bells 'n whistles that come with that approach (Panasonic, Olympus, Fujifilm and Sony have come quite a way in these last few years). But, should I take on some more pro studio gigs in the future, I'll definitely consider one.

Totally forgot to add the 'T' in there.

I got one of those notifications per actual mail. Like a day after it had already arrived. xD That was pretty useless. But hey, they've got a bunch of 99,-'s to spend, so why not waste money on international post and paper too, not like we care about the environment. Don't understand the whole thing with the keys by snailmail anyways. Just about every piece of (expensive) software these days is downloaded from the interw3bz and activated by a digital key. Even Blackmagic Design figured the idea of a physical dongle is pretty rubbish (although it's nice to have it work on multiple devices) and has switched to e-keys. 'Foolproof' is the oldschool way, it can't be hacked. Yeah, and then you yourself have a backdoor in your set-up allowing for a V-Log L exploit. D'OH.

Says 'In Stock' here though: http://www.panasonic.com/uk/consumer/cameras-camcorders/camera-accessories/others/dmw-sfu1gu.html . Otherwise, as said: Pricerunner.co.uk points towards: https://www.foto-koester.de/zubehoer/buecher-und-software/39431/panasonic-dmw-sfu1gu-v-log-l-firmware-upgrade-gh4 . If you are really in desperate need and can't find no joy in finding one, I expected this shortage to hit every now and again and prepared myself by getting one in advance, eventhough I haven't upgraded my GH4 (already with V-Log L on it) to GH5 yet (waiting for reviews on the summer (uh... I thought it was summer already?) updates and perhaps a 12-35mm f/2.8 II kit, although it seems people say the older performs better). As I don't need to use mine quite yet... I could send you mine and order another. But again, the whole idea was to have one at home the moment I dropped the hammer on the GH5, so please first exhaust your other posibilities.

Sure, for example I like to adapt Contax Zeiss lenses, so you'd put the C/Y to EF adapter on an EF to M4/3 focal reducer and Bob's your uncle. Same for Leica R or the things you and others mentioned. I do have a Nikon to M4/3 Metabones XL in addition to the Zhongyi EF Lens Turbo. Because the Metabones in EF is rather expensive and I have no need for the electronic interface that is implemented. The Nikon mount itself however is a little less flexible in terms of other mount types you can adapt to it (you might be able to do Leitax mount swaps or use adapters with optic elements, but not ideal). EF remains the winner there. But, I do have a lot of Nikon glass anyways, so it allows for direct mounting. You might encounter a bit more play in your set-up when working with multiple adapters... or that you can't focus to infinity or something anymore. Very tight tolerances there, but as a cheap solution it works.

Hum, interesting. I knew about new techniques to cut the glass differently as to avoid the onion ring effect, but this trans focus stuff is pretty new to me. I kinda like hard edge (or even soap bubble) bokeh balls though. But there's something to say for some optics rendering the out of focus areas a little too nervous and distracting. Nice diffuse smooth backgrounds really enhance the shallow depth of field look.