Category: Geek Articles
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Disassembling the Lumix S Pro R70-200mm f/4 OIS
We’ve been impressed with most of the lenses that have come out for the L mount cameras but haven’t taken many of them apart. But as luck would have it, we have several Panasonic Lumix Pro 70-200mm f/4 OIS lenses needing repairs for autofocus issues. In the U. S., Panasonic doesn’t offer repair…
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A Brief History of Early Lenses: Part 1
### Things Have Been Around Longer Than You Think We are all recent-centric. We tend to think the technology we use didn’t exist until last year or so, even though the roots of it go way back. Phone apps are a great example. I have a dozen little apps on that phone that do things like calculate…
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Why Manufacturers Make a Specific Camera Lens
### A Camel is a Horse Designed by Committee There is a lot of online discussion about why a manufacturer made this lens when they so obviously needed to make that other lens. Or why this manufacturer’s design is better than that manufacturer’s magical solutions. So, I thought I’d share the…
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Feeling Insured: Understanding the Differences in Production and Equipment Insurance
“Jaws” writer Carl Gottlieb had a group of us enraptured on a set in New Mexico, talking about his location visit to the classic Robert Altman film, “MASH,” when two stuntmen acting perhaps ironically as dead bodies nearly went down with a helicopter just after it had taken off for a shot. They had…
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Understanding the Difference in Global and Rolling Shutters
When getting started on video, you may run into a common problem, with no easy explanation of what’s going on. During quick pans, your footage may look like jello, or when recording video of rotating objects, they may look like they’re rotating slower than they are, or not at all. These are all…
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Understanding Light Control – Photographing Black on Black and White on White
If you’ve dabbled in off-camera lighting or even natural lighting at times, you’ll quickly discover how difficult working with white can be. It’s no surprise that many people ask their subjects specifically not to wear white clothes, as it’s easy to blow out the highlights and ruin an otherwise…
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How the Light Placement Alters Your Subjects
When teaching basic lighting principles, I break down how to light a subject into having three basic variables – Intensity of Light, Quality of Light, and Direction of Light. The intensity of light is pretty simple in its execution – how bright or dim your light is. Quality of light refers to…
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How Your Flashtube Position and Shape Changes Your Light Quality
When I learned that Lensrentals.com would start carrying the Profoto Pro-11 and Profoto Pro Heads, I was really excited. Not necessarily because they’re the workhorse standard for large-scale commercial photography, or that Pro-Heads are commonly what I use in my own work, but because of an added…
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How I Got The Shot – Creating Photos Based on Digital Art
We’re used to seeing a lot of lenses disassembled on this blog, where MTF charts are more frequent than example photos. So I walked into this article with a bit of skepticism – certainly, we’ve never tried an elaborate photo breakdown before. But with photoshoots this past year far less frequent…
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Investigating the Canon R5 Heat Emission
_ADDENDUM: I should have mentioned in the text, all testing was done at 73°F (22.75C) ambient temperature._ Lots and lots of people are talking about Canon R5 heat cut-offs. The discussions range from technical discussions about heat generation, cooling methods, and firmware protocols to strident…
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The Fujifilm GFX 100 vs Salt Water Teardown
*Lensrentals.com, 2020* So today is “Every Dark Cloud Has a Silver Lining Day.” The dark cloud involves a Fujinon GFX100 medium format camera that went out on rental, got used in a dive housing, and ‘suddenly died for no reason.’ Except on further investigation, well, maybe it got a little wet, but…
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The Great Flange-to-Sensor Distance Article. Part II: Photo Cameras
_If you’re a photo shooter, chances are you didn’t read Part I of this series on Cine Cameras. If you’re at all interested in the methodology, you should give it a glance, because I’m not going over that again. Today I’m going to just talk about photo bodies and what we found measuring…
