meanwhile

It's impossible to argue (sanely) that Kurosawa isn't excellent. But it's interesting that he comes up so much more that, say, Kubrick or Godard. And also that while he is widely referenced I don't see any signs of people actually absorbing him as influence. But, as Crow T Robot said, I digress: The point is that I wouldn't and didn't ask about blocking here because it's easy to find incredible books, articles and examples. The stuff I asked about is material I can't seem to get from books - how to work with very small consumer cameras like the GX80. Being told to look at a video about writing and blocking instead doesn't really help me with that. An example of the sort of thing I'm wondering about is how to pull focus when shooting handheld or even whether I should. My guess after pulling over 500 shots is that it can work reasonably well with a focusing lever and something like a chest brace. But it would be nice to know instead of told to learn to focus by re-making Ran.

I use the tupperware+bubble wrap method for my stills gear. The (generic) tupperware goes in military surplus bags. Usually British Army S6 rubberised gas mask bags. Light, tough, waterproof fabric, cost next to nothing. I link two together with a connector when I need more space, then if I need more again I carry another bag on the other side. Bubblewrap outperforms any expensive camera bag insert for shock absorb in absolute terms or per weight. And the tupperwares are waterproof and keep the bubblewrap together. Better, cheaper, lighter. Tripods and monopods I carry on a strap - use a cable tie to fasten a spilt ring to them. Reflectors ride on the strap of another piece of gear.

If you make an effort to spam the Internet with idiotic theories without making any attempt to research the subject you are ranting about, you are an idiot. Full stop. No one needs to be polite about this. If the guy had made any effort to actually learn the basics of the subject, no matter how incompetently, then he would have deserved some respect. But shouting as loudly as possible without making any attempt at gaining knowledge first deserves contempt.

The very respect Roger Cicala is going to start testing cine lenses as well as stills ones - https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/07/why-were-going-to-start-testing-cinema-lenses-and-why-we-havent-before/

The author of that discussion certainly wants to be taken seriously. But, no, it's a joke and he's incompetent. The main reason modern primes have more elements than older lenses is the switch from digital to film. He's too bloody ignorant to know this and too stupid to any research, but film accepts light from any angle whereas the thick filter - often 4mm deep - in front of a sensor means that it only sees light travelling parallel to the lens access - because the filter consists of long narrow tunnels like a lighting grid. This change in requirements adds a lot of extra elements, especially to fast lenses. If you don't have these elements then, with a digital sensor, contrast goes down, not up as Mr Stupid thinks. (This is why people who want to shoot vintage wide angles have the filters on A7's thinned, even though it reduces performance in other ways.) It would be one thing the silly man actually addressed the above and disagreed - but he's too ignorant to even know the basics of subject he's ranting about. This is example of http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect ..Which, yes, was discovered by the character from Archer. (True story: I look enough like Trotsky that people can't tell us apart except from the nose. And he's dead. And the friend I sat next to during my masters degree turned out to look just like Hitler - only no one noticed until he put a piece of black tape on his upper lip. Which won't make seem relevant unless you watch Archer, but there you go.)

If it helps, I have a really good way of carrying any sort of gear like this so it is protected and quickly accessible without adding much weight: - Buy a plastic food storage container - generic tupperware type stuff - slightly bigger than the whatever - Line with bubble wrap held in place with duct tape; squash selected bubbles or add more wrap as needed. ..That's it. You can carry almost anything this way and if you've spent a little time on fit it will slide in and out of the container fast but by almost invulnerable inside it.

The same vintage lens price varies on whether the lens has an all-black finish or black and silver. So no. They're really nice lenses but won't give me the FLs I want. The East German Pentacons are nice too, but there's the same problem. I need - well, want - at least a 28mm equivalent - and 24mm would be better. This might sound fussy, but that's stills people for you...This how I think of a wide: A 28mm is for doing shots like this ..A 50mm with the same amount of subject would have had a tighter background without the strong diagonals and the subject wouldn't have had the distorted nose etc that cues a viewer that she is inside personal space. This shot is a Moriyama. Winogrand was another great 28mm shooter.

I'm fairly sure that they're literally the same lens with a different name on. The sample variation due to lens history - bumps etc - is going to drown out any reasonable performance distances. The HFT and T* coating are impossible to tell apart - and often the Rollei branded versions were produced at Zeiss with Zeiss's coating - http://www.dantestella.com/zeiss/coatings.html Foot zooming doesn't work. Trust me; I'm a stills shooter. If you move forwards to make Mr Stallone occupy as much foreground with your 50mm as he would have done with a 100mm, he now has a different relationship to the background. Read eg https://petapixel.com/2017/04/20/zooming-feet-not-zooming-lens/ FLs are a fundamental stylising choice for this reason. Eg Daido Moriyama is a 28mm shooter and Bresson a 50mm; DM is punk rock and HCB is a chamber quartet. If I need to balance a camera out with a heavy lens, then it won't be the first time. But focal length is fundamental.

No. I've found the answers to the questions I asked useful. What I've found un-useful is the suggestion that I should try to learn how to pull focus by making a film instead of before making a film, so I can make the film competently without wasting collaborators' time. Anything I can practice without wasting an actor's time, I will practice without wasting an actor's time. To me this seems like common sense and good manners; I have no idea why some people object to this. Also, I appreciate the importance of writing, I just don't especially need to practice it, don't have time to practice it - you can only write so much in a day and I have a thousand words to do today - and when I want to improve my writing then I go to much better sources than Some Guy On Youtube Who Happens To Own A Video Camera. (As well as Egri I'd recommend Samuel Delaney's collection of essays. Although as far as I know he's never made a youtube video.) I agree Kurosawa is excellent on blocking - although I'd argue that Imaishi is more interesting because he's learned to take Kurosawa's blocking and run faster with it. But blocking isn't really relevant to the question I asked, which is how best to adapt my stills technique with a camera to video - it's a much higher level activity that I'll worry about once I have exposure in the groove, steady pull shots, etc.

Isn't this the Zeiss/Vlander/Rollei under another name? And it probably sells as a Yashica as well...?

Won't fool an expert unless you pretend the camera has broken down after a couple of hours.... Ok: name one of those analysts...

Must be a coincidence - I checked and she mailed me about shooting commercial style shots for her book with some guy called Chris in the NW asking me to look at his port, and then I probably saw your igram for some other reason. Weirder things happen - I look like a clone of Trotsky, bar the nose, and I used to hang out with a guy who only had to put a piece of black tape beneath his nose to look like Hitler...

Thanks, but would be too much trouble for you - I'm willing to settle for being approximate on fl. I'm sure I've seen your stills port - which is great - before. ...Did you recently shoot with a model who uses the online name Bluesy? This is my stills port http://ilikeicicles.weebly.com/

I'd be using the zoom on a focal reducer and the other lens without. So the 35mm becomes a 24mm. A 40 would pair very well fl wise - but I'm buying a fast zoom and a focal reducer because I do want fast lenses - I live in the NW UK and for a lot of the year light is scarce here - so the f2.8 loses points there. And Canon lenses have a strong look that I don't think meshes well with Sigma, although it is one I like a lot. ..Thinking about it, high contrast lenses are probably the best choice for shooting in overcast, which is standard for me. That seems like a very good answer! Thanks.

No one cares about anything of the end result is good. But that doesn't help you when you are considering HOW to make something good. What does is looking at what techniques generally help with creating that result and mastering them... So for - - Practice focusing and focus pulls until I'm happy with them, shooting leaves in the woods - See if I need to change my exposure techniques, ditto - Learn sound - Then re-make The Seven Samurai. Rather than learning how to pull focus by making the film. (On the subject of T7S re-makes, the best one imo isn't TM7 but "Samurai Seven" - an epic anime that was overshadowed by the above-mentioned Gurren Lagann.)

I'm using a GX80 and a $50 lens, so that's probably one of the cheapest set-ups here. And saying that "attention to detail" is important but that whether you use manual focus doesn't matter is why I didn't read the rest of your post... Film has grammar. You have to decide what parts of it you want to use. A vast part of that grammar is inaccessible on current cheap hardware without manual focus. If you don't understand this, I have no idea how large a detail has to be before you will notice it. Really, we're up at the "Is the lens cap on?" level.. You can certainly choose not to use that part of film grammar yourself, but if you haven't realised that a choice has to be made and that someone else may choose differently, then - well, you're a person whose posts aren't worth reading. Imo. And yes, story is important. But that doesn't mean that you should make it part of practising exposures or white balances right. Or waste time on kindergarten makework. (If anyone does want to work on their writing ability, I recommend Lajos Egri's work - it gave us Annie Hall and Gurrenn Lagann, so you can't deny it has scope...)

So I went out and shot focus pulls in the woods with a 55mm Takumar on my GX80 with no added hardware except the Sugru grip I made for stills. Conclusions - - I need an ND filter. Even in the NW UK, getting down to 1/50 with a wide open lens can be impossible without one, at least at this time of year. - As I expected, I need a focus lever - I need more batteries - the camera zooms through them - I need a grip that stabilizes the camera and supports the weight better while shooting manual focus. I'll try a different arrangement of Sugru, then a pistol grip, then a shoulder stabilizer if I have to No, there really isn't. It's a badly designed piece of make work for reasons I lack the patience to explain to you. Oh - I'll try, the short version is that good exercises in skill building fit into the grammar of an activity. To dumb it down, that exercise is like saying "Play a golf game wearing a blue scarf" rather than "Practice you swing for accuracy on a day with high cross winds." One limitation is random, the other is intelligently designed around the nature of the activity. A series of random exercises willing cover the scope of an activity by chance, will waste time, and won't build the feel for the grammar that gives the participant real insight. Example of good exercises in writing might be "Write a script using Shakespearean 5 act structure that lasts only ten minutes". Or "Write a character opposite to your own sympathetically and so that their POV is correct in the context of the story." Or "Plot a story where theme and antithesis are resolved in a way that leads to disaster for the sympathetic main character". More simply, it's a lousy way of getting practice in focus-pulling, and I don't need the practice in writing. I'm now struggling to find a way of answering that doesn't imply I don't respect your intelligence. The point I have been making - which should be an obvious one anyway - is that the intelligent thing to do when starting a new activity is to break into components and then practice those components in a focused way, rather than following you suggestion of learning how to pull focus by re-making The Seven Samurai. What on earth made you translate that as "I intend never to do anything BUT play scales"??? Honestly, bizarre. Please stop wasting my time. Otoh, any suggestions for keeping a handheld camera steady while focusing manually will be gratefully received. I'm hoping a pistol grip straight under the lens will help.

I'm fairly lens agnostic. I need the Sigma, so I'm happy to get a match. The Zeiss style does appeal to me though, so I'm happy to go for a member of that family.

I'm not great at vintage lenses, but hat's pretty much a Zeiss with another name, isn't it? The same optical design and coating, but a different factory? Will a high contrast lens make focus peaking work better? That seems reasonable..

Speaking more exactly now, it's not the mount margin around the sensor that counts, it's the margin of the image circle. This a characteristic of the lens as much as the camera body. Did you measure that? What were the answers? Also, if two image circles are "very similar" that doesn't mean much in this context. Eg a 38mm diameter circle may give 3mm of stabilization and a 35mm none. And the mounts and sensor placement may be identical. ...Give Fuji's extreme emphasis on telecentricity in lens design, it would be bizarre if the image circle had a significant margin. What this story amounts to is a rumour from a rumour site with, as it's only claimed piece of evidence, an actual lie - ie that Fuji demoed a stablized XPro in the past. Against that, Fuji have repeatedly explained why they can't build a stabilized body - and that explanation matches their lens designs and generally makes perfect sense. So I really wouldn't set yourselves up for disappointment!

The FD is undoubtedly a nice lens. But I'm lazy. And who wouldn't want to buy a lens called an Ultron??? (That's the Rollei version, I think.) Well, yes - a lens that old has to be cheap by now... NASA will probably pay me to take one off their hands.

When you said "contrasty" I thought Zeiss/Vlander/Rollei - or maybe Pentacon? Thanks, that's a big help.

IBIS consists of moving an image around inside the image circle. If the circle isn't big enough to move around in, that's it. No, it really isn't how innovation works. Some problems are tractable, some are not. Arguing that because someone did X someone else can do completely unrelated thing Y doesn't really work...

Something cheaper and vintage???

I'm looking for something that would have the same focusing direction (so not a Nikon) and would have a similar look...? I'd shoot the Sigma on a Turbo 2 and the 50mm unboosted to get a 100mm equivalent. 50 is ideal, but I'm open to anything from 35mm to 60mm. It's possible that I might shoot the lenses on separate bodies, with GX80s being so cheap, so maybe the two could have separate WBs and other in camera settings. But close without that would be nice - although I suppose I could store per-lens settings in a custom mode.