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My thoughts go back to those scifi books that talked about enabling your black ice before jacking into the matrix....

I find that the tele lens on the iPhone is no match for the 70-210 F4 and 2x TC on my GH5.

Speaking as one of the spam bots myself (see above) this makes sense, and as a bot who didn't post any spam links, I did always wonder WTH we were doing!

Link is broken.. ?

Great stuff. I wonder if now there will emerge spambots that betray other spambots in order to deflect suspicion elsewhere.... the AI arms race will be a fascinating thing to watch over the next decade or so.

My brain didn't un-melt yesterday, so didn't shoot any pics, however I did remember that I shot some comparison pics between the two setups previously: I remember I did have to move the camera between shots as the two lenses weren't exactly the same FOV, however just for discussion these two are an example of a 40mm and a 55mm+SB. I'm not seeing any differences to write home about, but maybe this isn't a good enough test. I would also encourage everyone to stop talking about perspective. Perspective isn't relevant unless you want to go wide with a shallow DoF. If you do want to go wider than what you can do with the 10mm f0.95 Voigtlander MFT lens, or the Sigma 14mm F1.8 + 0.64x SB combo on S35, or the Sigma 14mm F1.8 or Sigma 20mm f1.4 on FF, then that's great and good luck to you, but if that is what we're talking about here then the LF look doesn't apply with non-wide shots, or non-crazy-shallow-DoF shots. There are also a steady stream of f0.95 primes starting to appear for various formats, and at reasonable prices, so the shallow DoF / longer focal lengths combo should have options. If you are having a problem with the prices then just think about how much an LF camera costs, splash water on your face to recover, then come back to this conversation. I'm not sure about you guys, but when I first got my Voigtlander 17.5mm f0.95 lens I shot it wide open quite a lot, and what I worked out was that if you shoot it like this the look you get isn't the "high-end large format big budget cinema" look, it's the "there's something wrong with my eyes - help - I can't see properly" look. So, either the LF look is wide with shallow DoF, and that's fine (and I can ignore it because I don't care) or there is something else going on, in which case, talking about perspective is just confusing everyone and stopping us from figuring out if there is anything else to the large format look.

I've seen that happen on set - it's no joke! Luckily there was no-one under the light when it sprayed glass powder over half the bar we were shooting in.

Read through a few pages and my brain is already melted. Not from the technical aspects involved, but in trying to understand what people are actually saying. I think that part of the problem is that so many variables are at play that a proper conversation can't be had because people aren't communicating the full picture and are changing multiple variables at the same time. Even the animated gif in the thumbnail thread (showing the Canon camera and shallow DoF) clearly shows that the camera position has changed, which is hopeless - you can't compare the size of the bokeh if you're moving the camera around. All the talk of 'getting closer' in these articles and comments indicates that at least some people are talking about the difference between close/wide and far/tele shots, which is a completely different topic to standing in the same place and comparing setups that have the same FOV and DoF: a small sensor camera/lens setup a large sensor camera/lens setup, and a small sensor camera / large sensor lens with speed booster IIRC I have 55mm, 40mm lenses at home, plus a 0.71x SB for the 55mm, so should be able to do a comparison (55mm x 0.71 = 39mm). I'll see if my brain recovers enough throughout the day to be able to do a test when I get home.

Thanks! All the good things in life turn into dumpster fires.... The only way to not offend anyone is to not say anything, and that still offends people but either they can’t hear you or they’re too oppressed by the status-quo to have a voice and be heard

No losing sleep for me. I'm interested in figuring it out in order to learn and build my skillset, and find this stuff absolutely fascinating. I'm thinking I might do some tests and see if I can isolate the variables - is there certain subject matter or situations that will emphasise the effect? You mention closer or mid shots, anything else? Do we need a person in frame, or can a still-life reveal the effect?

I looked up the CRI of tungsten and places just list it as 100.. and it's way cheaper than LED bulbs with lower CRI. Of course they're big and heavy and hot and chew power but for my purposes (the odd camera test at home) those limitations are fine. There's a table of CRI values in this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index I laughed - Low Pressure Sodium has a CRI of -44. I didn't know the scale could go negative!! ???

Ignore @xzobinx and his evil temptations... lots of older lenses flare like crazy - check out the Super Takumar flare in the car headlight shot of this (it's B&W but you'll get a sense of it): My memory of the raw footage was that the flare was full of reds and greens, but who knows how it would flare with the sun as it's waaaaaay brighter than car headlights

Careful.. someone will read this and take it one step further and we'll end up with some 2-bit cinema camera company. We've had those before and they only leave broken promises and heartbreak in their wake!

Wow.. @BTM_Pix and @Cinegain - you guys are very punny! There were some camera systems made that used an m42 mount but had a shorter flange distance, so you buy the lenses as m42 lenses and they fit perfectly on your m42 adapter but can only focus about 1cm in front of the glass. Great if you need to get a splinter out of your finger or something, but not so useful for anything else!

.....and @leslie and I will eventually sort out our infinity focus issues and then there will be more lenses in the mix Great stuff!

The video is cached just fine, but displays badly when it's playing but not when it's paused. I tried Firefox and it didn't have this problem at all, but I'd rather use Chrome if I can. It's very odd.

I've been doing lens and camera tests, and want to do them in a stable lighting environment, so I know that means I need some artificial light, and that it needs to be high CRI. My challenge is that I have no real need for this lighting apart from doing these tests, so I want to spend as little as possible. I'm assuming that the best option is a large power halogen light? Something like this? https://www.bunnings.com.au/arlec-1000w-halogen-worklight-with-tripod_p7070522 And maybe just bounce one / both of them off the ceiling (which is painted white) to soften things a little? Thanks.

Hahaha.. thanks for that... umm.... useful... advice! I've got about the same likelihood of getting my wife to pull focus or to appear in the tests as to get my teenage kids to be involved in any way whatsoever, but oh well!

I'm very interested in this and would like to get to the bottom of what you're seeing. Is it that a wide angle has a shallower DoF? On smaller sensors shallow DoF on wide-angle lenses is very difficult to do, so that would make sense. Or is it to do with the falloff between what is in focus and what isn't in focus? I'm 100% sure that there's some kind of engineering or physics principle behind what we're talking about, the challenge is figuring out what it is

Thanks for the feedback, that makes sense.. I'm completely fine with this being a continuous challenge or even just discussion about Soviet Primes as I think they don't get the attention they deserve. I was thinking that the next 'challenge' might be just purely budget-limited but instead of $200 it be something like $50, or $100 for the entire kit of equipment so that everything would be taken into account, plus it would be great to see what people can do with very little funds. Anyway, it's all just some fun and hopefully we all learn something in the process. The Industar 50-2 m42 lens is USD$20 with free worldwide shipping and adapters are also readily available.. I even posted a link to the Industar in the thread. I would imagine that being part of a challenge would involve at least some degree of... well... challenge! And the people that don't have any Soviet lenses are exactly the people that I would like to have bought one, to widen their horizons a bit. If only the right camera for that app had been more like the right camera for me! Thanks for the recommendation though, I'll check out that app and see if the peaking helps at all.

Any idea where "the look" comes from? That's what we're trying to figure out.

I'll try to do some proper lens tests of all these if I can work out how to film myself with manual focus lens and actually get correct focus. Let's hope someone has some tips - I've asked in the GH5 thread.

See this video: I'm watching Amazon Prime Video (The Expanse) on my MBP in Chrome on my external Dell monitor. Any idea why this is happening? And more importantly, how I can fix it? Thanks....

Does anyone have any hints on nailing focus on manual lenses when filming yourself? For example, I want to film a bunch of tests of myself (like the lens tests always have a model in them) but when the lenses are wide open I can't work out how to check critical focus. I've tried the app, but found that it doesn't have enough resolution to tell what's in focus, I can't setup something at the same distance and pre-focus because if DoF is only a cm or two then I can't make sure my eyes are exactly that distance. The only couple of thoughts I've had is either to hook up the HDMI out to a huge TV that I can see well enough, or to buy a telescope so that I can see the flip screen well enough from where I'm sitting. Help?

And now some test shots I took earlier today with the Industar 50mm F3.5. Every shot is wide open at F3.5. This wasn't shot with a speed booster, so is 100mm equivalent. This lens is US$20 with free world-wide shipping. You probably can't beat that for value if you're on a budget!