Lenses

[noone]

2 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

Even taking into account the 400mm FOV equivalence of you having it on an MFT camera, you are still going to be a bit short at those distances with a 200mm to be honest.

Covering football (the real one not the weird variants that all of you colonials have cobbled together  ), which, depending on the stadium, will typically have a 130m distance from my position to the other goal requires a fair amount of cropping with a 400mm to get anything meaningful for action at that end.

I think you'd benefit greatly with a lens that ended at 300mm rather than 200mm not just in terms of additional reach but also in terms of separation from the additional compression of the longer focal length.

Sigma have done a 100-300mm f4 in various mounts for many years which, whilst not exactly free, would be ideal if you went that route and is worth keeping an eye out on eBay for.

 

While I do agree (in part). with Australian football, unless the player is following the ball, most players are (sort of) playing in a smaller area of a huge ground.   You CAN be a very long way from the action a lot of the time and at times even 200 can be far too long.    I am not shooting any particular player and so I would often get somewhere not too far away from the goal posts and often the action gets close enough to use a 300mm lens FF or a short AF zoom at other times when the action is only metres away.    If I had a kid playing, I would find the spot that best suits the position they are playing and just shoot them when they were in range of my lens.   In other words, a LOT depends on the particular game and with some games, 200mm might be perfect and at others you might get nothing because it is too short  and still others it might be too long.

  A game like cricket on the other hand and you really need a longer lens as much of the action is in the middle of the field (often the same ground used for Australian football).   Even an old Canon EF 100-300 5.6 L would be ok for daytime games I think and can be found fairly cheap.

[BTM_Pix]

2 minutes ago, noone said:

While I do agree (in part). with Australian football, unless the player is following the ball, most players are (sort of) playing in a smaller area of a huge ground.   You CAN be a very long way from the action a lot of the time and at times even 200 can be far too long.    I am not shooting any particular player and so I would often get somewhere not too far away from the goal posts and often the action gets close enough to use a 300mm lens FF or a short AF zoom at other times when the action is only metres away.    If I had a kid playing, I would find the spot that best suits they position they are playing and just shoot them when they were in range of my lens.   In other words, a LOT depends on the particular game and with some games, 200mm might be perfect and at others you might get nothing and still others it might be too long.

  A game like cricket on the other hand and you really need a longer lens as much of the action is in the middle of the field (often the same ground used for Australian football).   Even an old Canon EF 100-300 5.6 L would be ok for daytime games I think and can be found fairly cheap.

Yeah, I'm not familiar enough with that particular sport to know exactly what sort of groupings the shots would need so it was more a general point about shooting from a fixed position with the 100m+ range that @kye was looking for. At that sort of distance, even a five or six player grouping is going to be challenging with a 400mm FOV equivalent. For stills, when you can crop then its not so much of an issue but for video, purely at the range he's talking about, its going to leave you a bit short in my opinion. 

For Test cricket, I used to shoot on 300-800mm but still wasn't averse to throwing a teleconverter on or using a cropped body to get a bit more reach but with 5 days to grind out you'd take any chance you could to add a bit of variety in the shots  

[noone]

11 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

Yeah, I'm not familiar enough with that particular sport to know exactly what sort of groupings the shots would need so it was more a general point about shooting from a fixed position with the 100m+ range that @kye was looking for. At that sort of distance, even a five or six player grouping is going to be challenging with a 400mm FOV equivalent. For stills, when you can crop then its not so much of an issue but for video, purely at the range he's talking about, its going to leave you a bit short in my opinion. 

For Test cricket, I used to shoot on 300-800mm but still wasn't averse to throwing a teleconverter on or using a cropped body to get a bit more reach but with 5 days to grind out you'd take any chance you could to add a bit of variety in the shots  

Yeah, cricket is a pain even with 300mm on APSC let alone FF.     I don't have many cricket photos (for major matches, Cricket Australia doesn't allow lenses over 200mm unless you have accreditation though I have been allowed in with my 300 2.8 at the local ground and only searched once when I didn't have anything longer than 200mm).   Even here (not the biggest of grounds), for cricket 300 is way to short more often than not but it is the same ground I shoot Australian football at.      Not a great photo but to show the reach limitations for cricket.  (The batswoman is the only person, male or female to have topped the one day international batting AND bowling lists- Stephanie Taylor, the West Indies captain).    Taken last year.

[kye]

4 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

Even taking into account the 400mm FOV equivalence of you having it on an MFT camera, you are still going to be a bit short at those distances with a 200mm to be honest.

Covering football (the real one not the weird variants that all of you colonials have cobbled together  ), which, depending on the stadium, will typically have a 130m distance from my position to the other goal requires a fair amount of cropping with a 400mm to get anything meaningful for action at that end.

I think you'd benefit greatly with a lens that ended at 300mm rather than 200mm not just in terms of additional reach but also in terms of separation from the additional compression of the longer focal length.

Sigma have done a 100-300mm f4 in various mounts for many years which, whilst not exactly free, would be ideal if you went that route and is worth keeping an eye out on eBay for.

 

I agree.  IIRC this was 200mm (400 equivalent) at about 100m.

Not terrible, but not a medium shot either!

I did a bit of a quick look for 100-400 zooms, as the difference between 70 and 100 isn't that much, and the Canon FD 100-400 looked good, but it definitely wasn't free either, so I decided to put it to the back burner and wait until I got used to the 70-210 I now have and see what limitations there are there.  My dad offered me a 500mm lens, but I think part of the reach it had was that the end of the lens was a good distance closer to the players than the camera was, so I declined  

A 100-300mm might be good.  I'm not sure how well my hand-holding (or monopodding) would be at 400mm! 

[BTM_Pix]

54 minutes ago, noone said:

 I don't have many cricket photos (for major matches, Cricket Australia doesn't allow lenses over 200mm unless you have accreditation though I have been allowed in with my 300 2.8 at the local ground and only searched once when I didn't have anything longer than 200mm).  

Yeah, the 300-800mm is not the sort of lens that I would have fancied smuggling in if I didn't have the accreditation.

Even with accreditation, it still raised a few eyebrows at the security check at the press entrance !

[BTM_Pix]

12 minutes ago, kye said:

I agree.  IIRC this was 200mm (400 equivalent) at about 100m.

Not terrible, but not a medium shot either!

I did a bit of a quick look for 100-400 zooms, as the difference between 70 and 100 isn't that much, and the Canon FD 100-400 looked good, but it definitely wasn't free either, so I decided to put it to the back burner and wait until I got used to the 70-210 I now have and see what limitations there are there.  My dad offered me a 500mm lens, but I think part of the reach it had was that the end of the lens was a good distance closer to the players than the camera was, so I declined  

A 100-300mm might be good.  I'm not sure how well my hand-holding (or monopodding) would be at 400mm! 

Thats a good illustration of the issue you run into with video versus stills as if you were shooting stills you would just take a huge liberty and crop it like this which makes it a more directed image.

But with video you don't really have that luxury without a lot more work in post, although you could shoot 4K with the intention of it being for 1080p and do a blanket centre crop when you edit.

You could also do the faux multi camera routine by having one track with the uncropped version and one with a punched in version to switch to, which would also give you some latitude for framing safety and some post stabilisation too.

If you wanted to experiment with a 300mm prime, there are quite a lot of old f4 manual ones on eBay that won't hurt too much.

[kye]

8 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

Thats a good illustration of the issue you run into with video versus stills as if you were shooting stills you would just take a huge liberty and crop it like this which makes it a more directed image.

But with video you don't really have that luxury without a lot more work in post, although you could shoot 4K with the intention of it being for 1080p and do a blanket centre crop when you edit.

You could also do the faux multi camera routine by having one track with the uncropped version and one with a punched in version to switch to, which would also give you some latitude for framing safety and some post stabilisation too.

If you wanted to experiment with a 300mm prime, there are quite a lot of old f4 manual ones on eBay that won't hurt too much.

Yeah, stills would be far easier, especially if you could find the money for a 45+ MP sensor which would give resolution to burn.

I do shoot 4K and deliver 1080, so cropping in post is definitely an option.  I kind of shoot to crop anyway, as things like stabilisation etc all crop to a certain extent.  TBH I'm shooting a lot but not really editing all that much as I'm still working out what to do with the footage, but because the object is to document the family I can get away with editing later - it's pretty difficult to shoot later - even the 100+ MP cameras can't see backwards in time ???

To a certain extent by not editing I'm missing the feedback loop to improve my footage, but I do review the footage, and I'm working on it.

1 hour ago, noone said:

Yeah, cricket is a pain even with 300mm on APSC let alone FF.     I don't have many cricket photos (for major matches, Cricket Australia doesn't allow lenses over 200mm unless you have accreditation though I have been allowed in with my 300 2.8 at the local ground and only searched once when I didn't have anything longer than 200mm).   Even here (not the biggest of grounds), for cricket 300 is way to short more often than not but it is the same ground I shoot Australian football at.      Not a great photo but to show the reach limitations for cricket.  (The batswoman is the only person, male or female to have topped the one day international batting AND bowling lists- Stephanie Taylor, the West Indies captain).    Taken last year.

Nice shot!

Interesting about the 200mm limit.  I didn't take a photo of it, which I now regret, but when I was in Bangkok at the golden palace there was a sign saying that personal cameras weren't to be more than 8mm film, so I figured that the GH5 not having any film was totally fine, and didn't put the Rode mic into the cold shoe until we'd gotten a few hundred metres inside the gates past security ???

2 hours ago, noone said:

While I do agree (in part). with Australian football, unless the player is following the ball, most players are (sort of) playing in a smaller area of a huge ground.   You CAN be a very long way from the action a lot of the time and at times even 200 can be far too long.    I am not shooting any particular player and so I would often get somewhere not too far away from the goal posts and often the action gets close enough to use a 300mm lens FF or a short AF zoom at other times when the action is only metres away.    If I had a kid playing, I would find the spot that best suits the position they are playing and just shoot them when they were in range of my lens.   In other words, a LOT depends on the particular game and with some games, 200mm might be perfect and at others you might get nothing because it is too short  and still others it might be too long.

  A game like cricket on the other hand and you really need a longer lens as much of the action is in the middle of the field (often the same ground used for Australian football).   Even an old Canon EF 100-300 5.6 L would be ok for daytime games I think and can be found fairly cheap.

That's a good description.  Potentially an overriding factor is that the parents from one team all sit together, and moving elsewhere is a social statement of sorts.  To that end I pretty much take what I can get, although the nature of the game is that the ball can move around very quickly and the players often roam freely too, so it's quite variable, which gives the edge to a zoom lens.  When I was shooting on the 200mm prime I just figured that the closer people got the tighter the shot I got of them and the nicer the subject isolation was  

[noone]

7 hours ago, kye said:

 

That's a good description.  Potentially an overriding factor is that the parents from one team all sit together, and moving elsewhere is a social statement of sorts.  

Lucky for me I am anti-social!   At least when it comes to photo ops anyway.

 

[mercer]

Trying to compare a newer Zeiss ZF 25mm 2.8 vs an old Rollei Zeiss 25mm 2.8. I’ve learned that a direct comparison doesn’t really help me too much as I get lost in the comparison... eventually my eyes can’t tell the difference. So I decided to take each lens to a different location and just shoot with it.

First up is the Zeiss ZF 25mm 2.8...

And for a totally different location, here is the Rollei Zeiss 25mm 2.8...

So, in my endeavor I learned that I enjoy shooting with the Rollei Zeiss a little more but the ZF Zeiss is definitely sharper.

Eventually I am going to narrow my lenses down to but a few with a goal to have one “vintage” and one “modern” lens for my favorite focal lengths. The Zeiss ZF “Classic” lenses are interesting because they seem to teeter the line between vintage and modern.

[BTM_Pix]

.

 

[mercer]

23 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

.

 

I couldn’t agree more. 

[BTM_Pix]

Just now, mercer said:

I couldn’t agree more. 

Haha....sorry. The image from the Zeiss ZF immediately put me in mind of a film but was too saturated so I did a quick edit but I withdrew it because I think its probably a bit disrespectful to do uninvited edits of someone's work.

[mercer]

5 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

Haha....sorry. The image from the Zeiss ZF immediately put me in mind of a film but was too saturated so I did a quick edit but I withdrew it because I think its probably a bit disrespectful to do uninvited edits of someone's work.

I don’t mind. Please do. I’m practically flying blind with this damn MacBook Air screen, so I imagine half of my images look jacked.

But since I posted those frames, I looked at a bunch of other ones and I came to a conclusion.

I need to just keep this stuff simple. I am not that talented at it and I need to get back to the writing portion rather than laboring over lenses. So, I think I am going to roll with my first, gut purchases... my Canon and Nikon lenses and the Samyang. This will keep my collection way below 10 and I’ll use the proceeds to invest in a better monitor. 

[BTM_Pix]

4 minutes ago, mercer said:

I don’t mind. Please do. I’m practically flying blind with this damn MacBook Air screen, so I imagine half of my images look jacked.

I just dropped the saturation and I was on that beach with Chief Brody  

 

5 minutes ago, mercer said:

But since I posted those frames, I looked at a bunch of other ones and I came to a conclusion.

I need to just keep this stuff simple. I am not that talented at it and I need to get back to the writing portion rather than laboring over lenses. So, I think I am going to roll with my first, gut purchases... my Canon and Nikon lenses and the Samyang. This will keep my collection way below 10 and I’ll use the proceeds to invest in a better monitor. 

I'm trying to keep mine down below 3 figures !

I behaved myself in Japan and only bought 3 so thats a start.

[mercer]

1 minute ago, BTM_Pix said:

I just dropped the saturation and I was on that beach with Chief Brody  

 

I'm trying to keep mine down below 3 figures !

I behaved myself in Japan and only bought 3 so thats a start.

Shit, Jaws is my favorite movie, so that may have been subconscious. Damn you, now I am reconsidering the Zeiss ZF.... lol. 

[mercer]

@BTM_Pix do you have that many? Damn, now I feel good about myself because I have half that... but most are a bunch of generic old lenses that I need to get rid of.

It’s funny now that I see your version, I can see that mine is way over saturated. I struggle finding the right mix between contrast and saturation.

Haha, I really am reconsidering these ZF lenses. I have the 24mm 2.8, 28mm f/2 (which I haven’t even tested because I’m afraid I’ll like it too much) and the 50mm 1.4. The 50mm 1.4 is a strange lens... I want to not like it, but I can’t help to...

[BTM_Pix]

1 minute ago, mercer said:

@BTM_Pix do you have that many? Damn, now I feel good about myself because I have half that... but most are a bunch of generic old lenses that I need to get rid of.

I haven't (daren't  ) done a formal count but its probably in the same ballpark as you.

[homestar_kevin]

Whoa Whoa Whoa,

Let's not do anything crazy like count the number of lenses we own. No one wants to go through that ??

Everybody Be cool.

[BTM_Pix]

21 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

I behaved myself in Japan and only bought 3 so thats a start.

And this is one of those three.

I have quite a few cameras with MFT mount but I've never really bought anything from the mid let alone high end range of native lenses.

Partly because I have lenses that I'd sooner use through adapters but also because I just baulk at the price of them really.

As a consequence my collection mainly consists of cheap secondhand editions of the lower end stuff but while I was away I spotted a cheap used edition of a mid end one, the  Panasonic Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60mm f/2.8-4, and bought it as I was looking for a fastish (by MFT standards) standard zoom with stabilisation.

As this one has a bit of extra reach on the long end, albeit at the loss of some speed, I thought it made even more sense and I have to say its not bad at all, although it probably distorts more than I would like at the wide end.

For use as an all round travel zoom, particularly with a non stabilised camera like the OG Pocket Cinema Camera that I was using it with here, I think its a keeper.

[kye]

6 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

For use as an all round travel zoom, particularly with a non stabilised camera like the OG Pocket Cinema Camera that I was using it with here, I think its a keeper.

Yeah, that lens is a pretty good match for that situation.  The lack of fast / cheap / stabilised lenses is what pushed me from the P4K to the GH5, and while that lens isn't fast, it's probably the best compromise I've seen for that purpose.