Category: Equipment
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The Most Rented Point and Shoot Cameras from the Past Year
Several years ago, it would have been a safe bet to assume that point-and-shoot cameras would be a thing of the past by 2023. And it makes sense, mobile phone cameras have improved significantly over the years, closing the gap between the two platforms, and generally becoming more practical with…
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How Sports Leagues Build out Elaborate Instant Replay Systems
Many sports started as a somewhat primitive idea – most involve a ball of some sort, catching and throwing, and added elements to make the game competitive and unique. However, in the last few decades, technology has made its way into professional sports in a big way. From coaches making plays on…
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What Netflix’s Approved Camera Attributes Mean and Which of Our Cameras Qualify
As our video services have grown over the last few years, we’ve gotten more and more questions about which of our cameras are “Netflix-approved.” While plenty of companies might have unspoken preferences about the quality and format of media they produce, few have gone as far as Netflix in defining…
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Shooting Anamorphic on the RED V-Raptor
Recently, my team and I got a proposal to make a music video for an alternative rock band. Their pitch boiled down to essentially “a throwback to 70’s/80’s horror movies, but with modern production values.” We went back and forth on a few ideas regarding aspect ratios, cameras, lenses, camera…
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Exploring Aputure Lighting and What’s Best For Your Shoot
Lensrentals carries a _lot_ of lights. In fact, if you combine strobe and continuous, lighting is our fastest-growing product category. And our fastest-growing manufacturer within that product category? That’d be Aputure. In just a few years we’ve gone from a single Aputure product to over two…
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Revisiting the Sony FX3
Given that Sony’s recently-released FX30 is in extremely high demand at the moment, I thought it might be a good time to take another look at the FX3. After all, while the FX3 is a little older, it wouldn’t be accurate to call the FX30 an “upgrade.” However, even at half the price of the FX3 and…
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Staff Picks of the Best New Photo and Video Products of 2022
Earlier this week, we published the top rentals for 2022. There were plenty of surprises on the list, especially when we started to dig further down in the analytics and numbers, but the Canon EOS R5 reigned supreme as our most rented piece of gear for 2022. In fact, all of the gear on the top 20…
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The Top Rented Cameras and Lenses of 2022
Each year, we go back through our data of rentals, and present to you which products are the most rented gear for that year. To us, it feels like a good judgment of the industry, as we’re one of the world’s largest rental houses for lenses and cameras. Parsing this data, and comparing it to…
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Product Spotlight: Aputure Accent B7c
Lighting in the world of low-budget, small-crew filmmaking is always a balancing act. Whether shooting a narrative project or a documentary, you’ll rarely be providing all the light in a scene using your own gear. Far more often, you’ll be supplementing and modifying light sources that are already…
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Why has the Fuji X100V Grabbed the Attention of Millions?
Released in early 2020, the Fujifilm X100V was the latest iteration of their X100 line, and is known to be a tried and true rangefinder-esque walkaround camera that didn’t cost the prices of something from Leica or other competitors. However, over the last few weeks, the Fujifilm X100V has become…
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Comparing Studio Strobes and Constant Lighting for Photography
A common question when bringing off-camera flash to your repertoire is whether you should invest in studio strobes, or if you should be using consistent lighting for your photography work. If this were ten years ago, I’d say to invest in strobes, and this advice would look more like a tweet than an…
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How to Quickly Ruin Your Camera and Lens
Typically, this blog stands on the idea of “Please protect your gear, and if it’s our gear you’re renting from us, please absolutely protect the gear”. However, mistakes happen, and things break. When you have an inventory as large and diverse as ours, that reality happens way more than we’d care…
