Latest Lens Lore

My posting has been very sporadic lately - it's because I'm in production now on Cosmo's and I don't want to give too much away. I feel like if I show pictures of what the film is going to look like then there won't be any surprises when I finally unveil this bad boy - and we all like surprises, don't we? Well, good ones anyway, and I assure you you're all in for some good surprises when I release this thing. 

So I've been posting about other stuff.

Sporadically.

But it's time to bring the bloggosphere up to date on what's been going on in the Darkstudio behind the scenes, the stuff that's shaping the look and feel of this film.

Above is a pic of the Fujinon-TV 12.5mm f1.4 lens 

 Not mine, I grabbed it off the web, but that's exactly what mine looked like before I packed it up and shipped it off to England for modifications. It's hard to find wide angle lenses that give full coverage on the Micro Four Thirds sensor - but as I mentioned a couple of posts ago I found Edward Koehler, who does these mods brilliantly - through his site at ekoe Camera. 

Looking back, I went about this the wrong way - rather than buying a lens and having to ship it across the atlantic for mods, then back across the pond to me, I should have bought one from his stock and it only would have had to pond-jump once (it cost me $100 just to ship it to him!!). But he was exceedingly cool about it all - even though the lens had been partially modified by someone else (they didn't quite get full coverage out of it) and they had superglued the  lens to the mount - a very dangerous gambit that can easily result in the lens suddenly just falling off and destroying itsef at your feet - he machined a retaining ring from aluminum to restore it to full working strength and eliminate that danger - plus he added a huge 72mm filter ring because he knew I like to keep clear UV filters on my lenses to keep my greasy fingerprints off of them, which gives it a totally different look (see it in the pic below):

Not only does it resemble a Pirate Blunderbuss now with that massive flared snout, but it gets complete coverage - no darkening at the corners, no softness of focus near the edges (as long as I'm not shooting wide open with it). 

Ok, next up is my cool little ultrawide lens - the Elbex-TV 8mm f1.3. Just like the (pre-modified) Fujinon-TV 12.5 I posted above, this lens doesn't give full coverage on a Micro 4/3s sensor (it's even worse):

All you get is a black rectangle with an image circle in the middle. But believe it or not - this isn't really a problem (well, it can make it difficult to frame your shots precisely - but that can be fixed as I'll explain in a moment).

Here's the exact same shot after a minute or two messing with it in Lightroom:

.. And wouldja believe - from that little image circle in the Elbex-TV 8mm I can still pull HD sized images after cropping!! Amazing!! Not only that, but working with the camera's RAW image files, Lightroom is able to do unbelievable things - you can do incredibly subtle adjustments to white balance, highlights, whites, shadows, darks, color saturation and vibrancy etc... essentially you can make em look real good. You can even distort or un-distort to whatever degree you want - shoot with a normal or long lens and make it look like a wide angle or even extreme wide angle with barrel distortion, or shoot with a fisheye and de-fish. I'll be doing a post soon about Lightroom - and let me tell you, now that I have it, I can't understand how I ever got along without it - my shots that I thought looked pretty good before now look like crap compared to what I'm capable of.


I've also been thinking about a zoom lens, for those nifty 70's shots:

In fact with the assortment of lenses I currently have, it's the only thing left that I want (used-to want - read on dear readers.. ). I did a little web research and the options for a decent zoom lens that works on m4/3 are pretty limited - the one that kept coming up is the Rainbow H6x8-II 8-48mm Zoom Lens. I was preparing to try to find one on fleabay and then send it somewhere for the necessary mods, when it suddenly struck me - I HAVE one of these!!! I got it back when I was using my Hitachi analog broadcast camera. In fact after I first got my Lumix G1 I remember trying it with a c-mount adapter and being disappointed because it does the image cirlce in a black rectangle thing (I wasn't aware of just how much you could crop out in those days). 

I found this little video showing how some guy modified his to work: Rainbow H6x8-II Lens Modification for GH2 / Micro Four Thirds Cameras on Vimeo.

Well, I also happen to have the exact same kind of c-mount adapter laying around that he used (oh yeah,  this mod was a total freebie!), so I did a little drilling and dremeling this morning and it worked like a charm: 

At least the physical modification did. I don't understand how to adjust the back focus in order to make it what's called parfocal - so as you zoom you don't lose focus. That has to be precisely adjusted for the exact lens and camera, and apparently it's best done in a camera shop by trained professionals. I was beginning to consider finding a shop to get this done but I went ahead and did a few animated zoom tests (even though it has a very short range where it stays in focus) and realized there's no need to actually have a zoom lens - since there's no perspective shift during a zoom, it looks exactly like a digital zoom that can be done in software. Or I could just move the camera itself toward or away from something, adjusting focus frame by frame as I go, and get a tracking shot that could resemble a 70's style zoom (but look even cooler thanks to the perspective shift). 

Okey dokey then - that brings us up to date on the lens front. Soon I'll do a Lightroom demo, but up next - more news on that European Puppetry documentary.

** Edit **

I just discovered Byrne Power has already created his Gravity From Above blog, where he'll be sharing his progress in making the European Puppetry documentary I blogged about last time. I've added it to my blogroll for easy updates. I want to do a followup on Byrne himself and his other site The Anadromous Life - next time I promise!

Legacy lenses

I took a break from animating to put together this little video showing my legacy lenses - well, the ones that are currently in my possession anyway. Sorry if I got a little carried away with putting on and taking off every accessory on every lens, including the lens caps! The video slideshow is the fun way to look at my collection, but YouTube has seriously blurred things to the point where you can't make out details at all (unless you click through and switch to 1080p resolution on YouTube) - so I've also uploaded a few pics to Flickr where you can see each lens in far more detail than you'd probably ever care to:

Wollensak Cine Raptar 1" (25 mm) f2.5Click the images to see them on Flickr

Above and below are my 2 C-mount Cine lenses, made for 16 mm movie cameras. These could date as far back as somewhere in the 30's, and I suspect the little one above just might. I got it from eBay for a song, with an old Revere movie camera attached! The camera doesn't work, I'm using it strictly as a rear lens cap. In the video above you can see, this little sucker breaks down ridiculously far - there's a lens hood that comes off and then there's another piece that also comes off - not sure what that piece would be called. This one looks really crazy on my camera. Unfortunately it also vignettes pretty badly - so bad the photos are inside of black circles. It also doesn't have a focus ring. Not sure this one is worth using - glad I got it for $25! 

Wollensak Cine Raptar 2" (50 mm) f2.5

This one is much more like it! Another C-mount lens made for 16 mm movie camera use, but this one doesn't vignette at all (a lot of the 25 mm and under ones do on m43 cameras). This is a hefty and beautifully worked hunk of steel. Has a very cinematic look because of the way it renders highlights in out-of-focus areas. In fact all the legacy lenses I've got ahold of are extremely cinematic. The front section is a hood that comes off. 

Fujinon-TV 25 mm f1.4

This one is a CC TV lens, built for security camera, machine vision or closed-circuit TV use. Vignettes just ever-so-slightly right in the very corners in 16:9 mode, but when I crop to widescreen format that should disappear entirely. It actually looks rather pleasant, and generally can't be seen at all in dark shots (which I've been known to use now and then.. ), but if necessary I can crop it further and still end up with greater than HD resolution. This is the companion lens to my even wider 12.5 mm f1.4, which is currently in England being modified to eliminate the vignetting entirely (as detailed in my last post). These two have the lowest f-stop number at 1.4, meaning the aperture (iris) opens up nice and wide to let in lots of light - what's known as a fast lens. The faster a lens is, the shallower depth of field you can capture with it.

Carl Zeiss Contax-G 45 mm f2

And finally my two Contax-G lenses above and below. I described them well enough in the last post I don't feel the need to do it again. But I did feel bad for posting a web pic of somebody else's lens in that post, so thought I'd like to post pics of my own.

Carl Zeiss Contax-G 35 mm f2

Ok, enough.. time to get back to the actual animatin'!! 

Enabling live view out on the G1!!

Well well.... Lookie what I got here!! It LOOKS like a honest-to-goodness Live Video Feed from my G1. But -- it can't be. No such thing is possible, right?

Wrong!!

There's a little trick - a hack of sorts, in Panasonic cameras (some anyway - I'm assuming the ones with an LCD viewscreen attached)). All you have to do is hold down the trashcan button for about 30 seconds in record mode (regular picture-taking mode, not review mode). Suddenly the image on the viewscreen of the camera will go dark for just an instant. Was there a tiny click or sound of some sort from the camera? I thought so, but it might have just been something in my head busting wide open from the sudden release of tension, and the inrushing of excitement to replace it.

I can't even tell you what a rollercoaster these last few days have been for me... deciding to buy the G1, discovering the live feed doesn't work, the anger and frustration and the decision to sell it and start researching for a micro four thirds camera that would work... then the sudden green light when I remembered reading that this trick works with some cameras.

I was sitting down at the time eating some stir fry chicken and watching the trailer for the upcoming Harryhausen Tribute when it happened. I leaped from my seat in a rush of excitement to try it, but decided to wait till I was done eating so my rather excellent dinner wouldn't go cold. I could hardly contain myself... and ate way too fast. With a bit of a tummyache, I then levered myself up and began to set things up for the test. Imagine my consternation and frustration when before I could even finish opening Framethief the camera shut itself down with an audible electronic groan due to expended battery life!!

I put it on the charger and chewed my nails for 2 and a half agonizing hours waiting as electricity slowly trickled into that faceless, mocking little cube of plastic. But at last it was full as I was, and the test commenced. Now I'm full and satisfied. What a day!!


Oh, and yes, I can easily make all the screen icons go away with the click of a button.


Oh oh!! And I almost forgot to add.... you have to reset the Resolution settings in Framethief to 3:2, which is the native resolution of the Micro Four Thirds camera system (strange as that may sound... part of the reason for the very name is because the default resolution they provide is 4:3). Another discovery made in my exhaustive research recently to save the day. I kept trying various resolution presets provided in Framethief to no avail, Buster always looked either too Laurel or too Hardy, if you get my drift. But of course, the presets were configured for VIDEO cameras, not still cameras! So recalling a strange bit of trivia I dug up the other day (which incidentally explains why the MFT cameras truly use full resolution in all aspect ratios, 16:9 as well as 4:3 etc) I manually punched in 3:2 and it worked!

Heh... actually this explains the weird setup with Skulkin leaning on Buster above.... I was beginning to doubt my eyes and think that maybe Buster was really either thicker or thinner than I believed. I propped Skulkin up against him so I could see another face... Buster's is rather strangely proportioned.

It didn't help... Skulkin is rather weirdly put together too...

The Lumix Smackdown Challenge - putting the G1 and the FZ50 through their paces

XtremeCloseupG1full

I won't write a lot about this here... just click the image above and view the group of pictures uploaded to my Lumix Smackdown Challenge set. Yes, I finally decided it was time to buy the much-lauded G1 and give it a whirl. 

A warning right up front though - DO NOT BUY THE G1 FOR STOPMO!!! It does NOT have a true full-time live feed that works with a framegrabber!!! (Actually it DOES have live view out - see next post for details on how to enable it) In many other respects it remains similar to it's larger but less refined cousin the FZ50, but for some reason Panny decided to disable the full-time live view out. 

In fact my research revealed that NO Micro Four Thirds camera yet made has live view out that actually functions in another device (like a framegrabber for instance)... until the newly-released GH2. I might be selling my shiny sexy new G1 to get one and test it out. Keep watching this space. 

Ok, for more info check THIS THREAD at the stopmotion message board. 

Enough typing for tonight... Im wiped out from massive research and camera testing.