Category: Lenses and Optics
-
Photographing the Largest Rocket Ever Flown
SpaceX, the trailblazing aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, continues to redefine the possibilities of space travel with its ambitious Starship program. The recently completed second integrated flight test of Starship Super Heavy marked a crucial milestone in the journey towards the company’s goal of interplanetary exploration and Mars colonization. Amidst the excitement and anticipation, […]
-
Biggest Photo & Video Announcements for Late 2023
This fall has had some spectacular announcements in the photography and videography world, with near gear pushing the bounds and making productions easier than ever. And while we plan on carrying all of these big announcements, it’s not always viable that we write long reviews of each product (Though if you want our expanded thoughts […]
-
The Best Lenses Available for Under $400
Finding affordable lenses in the photography marketplace has become more and more of a challenge over the last few years. Where a $2,000 price tag was once considered expensive, has now become normalized. There are plenty of lists online recommending expensive lenses, heck, we posted our list of the most expensive lenses just a few […]
-
The Most Expensive Lenses Currently in Production
When you start your photo or video career, you’ll likely find several lists containing the best bargain lenses available for your interested style. These lenses often include the nifty 50, cheap but sharp zoom lenses, and various other lenses that are considered staples within their focal length. But what about expensive lenses? Sure, all quality […]
-
How Your Camera’s Focus Bracketing System Works
For many years, photographers have had focus-stacking programs like Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker. You can now get the capability in some general-purpose image editors like Lightroom and Capture One Pro. Focus stacking software takes as input a series of images of the same subject with the focal plane in a different place in each […]
-
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 movement, and lighting. After deliberating, […]
-
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 […]
-
How Front Element Scratches Affect Your Images
We have a lot of gear in our inventory, which means we also have a lot of broken gear in the middle of repairs. When it comes to lenses, one thing we see a lot in the repair department is front element scratches. And that makes sense, when a lens is mounted, it’s the single […]
-
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 to admit. So after […]
-
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 really, just […]
-
A Brief History of Early Lenses: Part 1
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 depth of field…
-
Why Manufacturers Make a Specific Camera Lens
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 second-hand information I have about the process because it’s probably better than the made-up speculation I read online.