02-16-2022, 07:59 PM
I figured it might be fun to open a topic on photography/videography, in particular the budget/scrappy variety. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts, stories, suggestions, feedback, etc.!
A few years ago, my great uncle passed away. He was at one time a photographer and left a collection of photographic equipment, mostly Nikon/Nikkor cameras and lenses from the 60's and 70's, behind. Somewhat unsurprisingly, nothing is worth that much, the most maybe a few hundred dollars, some even under $100, and certainly not the thousands of dollars that modern professional lenses go for.
Photography (and moreso videography) has always interested me, so rather than see the lenses and such thrown away, I took them and started trying to learn.
My first camera was a budget Nikon DSLR. It took a long time to figure out things like exposure and focus, and the camera was pretty limited even for the time. However, it did force me to learn the basic relationship between ISO (sensitivity), Aperture, and Exposure (time).
Photography is a balance between those three aspects to get a good exposure. If any one is too high or too low, the exposure will be too bright or too dark. Too high of an ISO will cause grain, whereas too long of an exposure time may cause smearing due to shake unless on a tripod. The lens itself dictates the maximum and minimum aperture. It reminds me a lot of sampling, where we have to add together pitches, velocities, and articulations or round robins to get a good instrument. Each plays a role in the performance and quality of the final product.
The big thing I learned early on was how "big glass" and "big sensors" allow for much nicer looking out-of-focus areas than, say a smartphone camera. Distant light sources appear as balls or other shapes, called bokeh (most seem to suggest one should pronounce the word like the English term 'bouquet', i.e. 'Boh-kay'), and the rest of the image becomes smoothed the further it is from the plane of focus. The more open the aperture, the larger the bokeh 'balls' appear, and the 'shallower' the depth of field becomes. Similarly, the closer the subject is to the camera relative to the background, the more exaggerated the separation and bokeh become. Lastly, using a larger lens (higher size in mm = 'tighter' image) increases the separation and bokeh as well, so, for example, generally an 85mm will give more separation of the subject from the background than, say, a 20mm. Even objects 10-15 feet behind the subject can be smoothed into a rich blur with a 135mm!
Different lenses also allow you to 'compress' the distance between the background and foreground, as they grow larger. Long lenses like telephotos (above 100mm or so) also allow you to squish down the distance between the background and foreground; at an extreme, if you had something crazy (and totally not affordable) like a 2000mm lens, you can actually start to approach an isometric perspective!
I used to play with 'virtual' lenses back when I did 3D work around 2009-2012, so this was somewhat familiar to me, although there we could specify the depth of field manually.
The second thing I learned is that even very old lenses like these can perform very well, especially when 'stopped down', or shot using a slightly smaller aperture than their maximum. In general, lenses tend to perform their sharpest around 2-4 stops closed from maximum ('full open'), although newer lenses perform decently even at just one stop down and sometimes even when fully open.
By 'perform well', here's an example shot with the 35mm f/1.4 at both f/1.4 and f/2.0, a really awesome lens which seems to have been my great uncle's favorite, from the wear:
[attachment=132]
[attachment=133]
Even at a distance, you can see how many things end up "soft" at "full open". It actually reminds me of the appearance of some old TV shows or movies from the 60's and 70's. By f/2.0 though, it is behaving much more nicely and would probably pass at least as a modern 'kit' lens which comes with a camera.
Eventually I ended up going mirrorless with a Sony a6500 and now a7SII (since I primarily do video now). The advantage of mirrorless is you see EXACTLY what you are photographing/filming electronically on the screen or in the viewfinder; no test shots, no tweaking, WYSIWYG. It also gets around the problem that these older lenses are designed to work with mechanical cameras and aren't directly compatible with modern Nikons unless adapted (which these are not). Overall, mirrorless is definitely the way to go in my opinion; way less hassle, plus the cameras are smaller and lighter too.
The a7SII is particularly nice for video nowadays as it shoots 4K/30p at very decent quality and only costs $1k used (from places like Adorama in NYC), due to its successor, the eye-watering $3.5k a7SIII, being available. The a6500 is even cheaper now used, but it is the smaller APS-C sensor size so everything will be 'zoomed' in about 30%. For general use, something like an a7II or whatnot might be a better option. Regardless the a7SII and original a7S was and is still used by many youtubers as well as professional videographers and news organizations around the world.
Honestly with how good cameras have gotten now, there are lots of great older/used mirrorless options available now for under $1k for anyone looking for a professional experience, and vintage lenses are surprisingly affordable. The sensors are still surprisingly improving quite a bit with each generation, but even older digital cameras can perform very well. Just by eye, I'd say something like the a7SII looks as sharp and clean as films and TV shot on digital about a decade ago. That kind of price drop is insane compared to the music industry, where the "industry leading" stuff just floats around out of reach in the $2,000+ range seemingly forever. Imagine if U47's cost $200 today!
With a simple 'dumb' adapter, I can use the cheap but surprisingly decent vintage Nikkor lenses directly on the Sony alpha cameras. The colors sometimes need a little tweaking as some of the coatings seem to have slightly discolored in some of the lenses, but the results are still remarkable.
One good source I found for reviews/information on old lenses, and not just for Nikon, is a fellow named Ken Rockwell. His site is a bit of a trip to a time when the internet had a different vibe, but the information is great and plentiful:
https://www.kenrockwell.com/
A friend of mine is into Canon lenses and cameras and has found a lot of great info on there to help him as well.
The highlight lens for me is the 85mm f/1.8. It is perfect for portraiture, and when stopped down slightly gives these characteristic hexagonal bokeh (at full open bokeh is round):
[attachment=134]
[attachment=135]
Here is one of my favorite photos I've ever taken on the 85mm, full open at f/1.8:
[attachment=136]
Rockwell claims this 85mm f/1.8 is Nikon's "worst" 85mm (albeit still very good) and yet it can still produce some pretty wildly gorgeous images, even fully open! Rockwell thinks you can get one for as low as $200 USD or so, which seems to me to be a bargain. Again, imagine if you could get such a beautiful, rich sounding microphone for just $200! Even the cheapest 'decent' ribbon mic I have found starts at $400...
It makes it seem relatively silly that some smart phones costing well over $1k take way worse photos than a lens from the 1970's adapted onto some few-years-old camera. Obviously all lenses and cameras now are wildly superior to what we were dealing with 20 years ago, a smartphone is way more compact and portable than this giant honking thing, and in all honesty, you can get great photos with literally anything, even early digital cameras like that Mavica. However the results from these old lenses are just really remarkable and beautiful in a way I can't really describe.
Apparently I read somewhere that Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was shot partially with Nikon (Nikkor) lenses, as they were the primary lenses used by war photographers and he wanted to capture that feeling. Whether or not that's true, it fits I guess, and the lenses are very sharp even today on digital equipment (when used appropriately).
Probably the most 'worthless' lens is the 80-200mm f/4.5 zoom. It is 100% manual like the other lenses, so no one really wants it, and you can't 'lock' the zoom in place (it slides with gravity if you tilt the camera too much!), but, it produces surprisingly impressive photos and costs under $100:
https://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/80-200mm-f45-n.htm
By the way, there is a small easter egg on the Versilian Studios website: on the home page, one of the photos was taken with a Sony Mavica floppy disk camera from the early 2000's! I doubt anyone really notices, as it's rather small. So, just like in music, it is all about how you use your tools, not necessarily what the tools are. Most of the other photos on the VS website and manuals were shot either with my phone or with one of these vintage lenses.
(sorry for the double-post, ran out of attachments but wanted to share a few more little things!)
The main reason I shoot in 4K is that, even when downscaled to 1080p, it is remarkably sharp. The other reason is that it's actually possible to crop into the shot up to 2x and still have 1080p resolution. This is very useful for example for a situation where you only have stationary cameras but want to "zoom" in on a performer or such. Sometimes also a very gentle zoom of 5-10% during the course of a shot adds to the sense of direction.
Here's an example from a videography project I did for a friend (I'm actually playing trombone on the right, in the center; all the cameras and mics are 100% unmanned!):
Because it's shot in 4K, I can crop in on the Left, Right, or Center camera to get sections or soloists without significant loss of quality. One can even digitally pan and zoom around at the same time! My favorite sequence starts around 16:00, as it slowly zooms in on the tenor, then has a shot panning across the choir. Gets me right in the feels every time!
This was actually a technique I learned about a few years ago, when it was described on the director's commentary, I believe either for S1 of Chuck or S1 of Eureka. I can't remember which, but they discussed how useful it was with digital to be able to crop and recompose shots in post, even with the lower resolution cameras of the day (I think they were 1440p or similar?). You can do this process even with smartphone video, but the digital noise, noise reduction, and quality of the lens limits how far you can go before it starts getting ugly.
There are other benefits; for example, in this case I couldn't remember the name of the piece or composer from a gig, but I was able to simply zoom in and take a look at the pianist's music!
[attachment=137]
[attachment=138]
Speaking of smartphones, you really have to hand it to modern manufacturers for how sharp the lenses manage to be. Here's another project where I only had two cameras at the time; I used an older iPad, which I purchased primarily for reading sheet music, with a 3rd party camera app which allows 4K/24fps recording, as the camera on the piano! Aside from it having basically no depth of field and appearing somewhat noisier, a little color grading was all it took to integrate into the other shots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFT_qkuX...Pm&index=4
[[ah, only one video allowed per post too]]
The other cameras are a 35mm covering the room, and the aforementioned 85mm at f/2 on the trombonist (you can just about make out the hexagonal bokeh on the trumpet bells, which is part of why I love recording in this space).
A few years ago, my great uncle passed away. He was at one time a photographer and left a collection of photographic equipment, mostly Nikon/Nikkor cameras and lenses from the 60's and 70's, behind. Somewhat unsurprisingly, nothing is worth that much, the most maybe a few hundred dollars, some even under $100, and certainly not the thousands of dollars that modern professional lenses go for.
Photography (and moreso videography) has always interested me, so rather than see the lenses and such thrown away, I took them and started trying to learn.
My first camera was a budget Nikon DSLR. It took a long time to figure out things like exposure and focus, and the camera was pretty limited even for the time. However, it did force me to learn the basic relationship between ISO (sensitivity), Aperture, and Exposure (time).
Photography is a balance between those three aspects to get a good exposure. If any one is too high or too low, the exposure will be too bright or too dark. Too high of an ISO will cause grain, whereas too long of an exposure time may cause smearing due to shake unless on a tripod. The lens itself dictates the maximum and minimum aperture. It reminds me a lot of sampling, where we have to add together pitches, velocities, and articulations or round robins to get a good instrument. Each plays a role in the performance and quality of the final product.
The big thing I learned early on was how "big glass" and "big sensors" allow for much nicer looking out-of-focus areas than, say a smartphone camera. Distant light sources appear as balls or other shapes, called bokeh (most seem to suggest one should pronounce the word like the English term 'bouquet', i.e. 'Boh-kay'), and the rest of the image becomes smoothed the further it is from the plane of focus. The more open the aperture, the larger the bokeh 'balls' appear, and the 'shallower' the depth of field becomes. Similarly, the closer the subject is to the camera relative to the background, the more exaggerated the separation and bokeh become. Lastly, using a larger lens (higher size in mm = 'tighter' image) increases the separation and bokeh as well, so, for example, generally an 85mm will give more separation of the subject from the background than, say, a 20mm. Even objects 10-15 feet behind the subject can be smoothed into a rich blur with a 135mm!
Different lenses also allow you to 'compress' the distance between the background and foreground, as they grow larger. Long lenses like telephotos (above 100mm or so) also allow you to squish down the distance between the background and foreground; at an extreme, if you had something crazy (and totally not affordable) like a 2000mm lens, you can actually start to approach an isometric perspective!
I used to play with 'virtual' lenses back when I did 3D work around 2009-2012, so this was somewhat familiar to me, although there we could specify the depth of field manually.
The second thing I learned is that even very old lenses like these can perform very well, especially when 'stopped down', or shot using a slightly smaller aperture than their maximum. In general, lenses tend to perform their sharpest around 2-4 stops closed from maximum ('full open'), although newer lenses perform decently even at just one stop down and sometimes even when fully open.
By 'perform well', here's an example shot with the 35mm f/1.4 at both f/1.4 and f/2.0, a really awesome lens which seems to have been my great uncle's favorite, from the wear:
[attachment=132]
[attachment=133]
Even at a distance, you can see how many things end up "soft" at "full open". It actually reminds me of the appearance of some old TV shows or movies from the 60's and 70's. By f/2.0 though, it is behaving much more nicely and would probably pass at least as a modern 'kit' lens which comes with a camera.
Eventually I ended up going mirrorless with a Sony a6500 and now a7SII (since I primarily do video now). The advantage of mirrorless is you see EXACTLY what you are photographing/filming electronically on the screen or in the viewfinder; no test shots, no tweaking, WYSIWYG. It also gets around the problem that these older lenses are designed to work with mechanical cameras and aren't directly compatible with modern Nikons unless adapted (which these are not). Overall, mirrorless is definitely the way to go in my opinion; way less hassle, plus the cameras are smaller and lighter too.
The a7SII is particularly nice for video nowadays as it shoots 4K/30p at very decent quality and only costs $1k used (from places like Adorama in NYC), due to its successor, the eye-watering $3.5k a7SIII, being available. The a6500 is even cheaper now used, but it is the smaller APS-C sensor size so everything will be 'zoomed' in about 30%. For general use, something like an a7II or whatnot might be a better option. Regardless the a7SII and original a7S was and is still used by many youtubers as well as professional videographers and news organizations around the world.
Honestly with how good cameras have gotten now, there are lots of great older/used mirrorless options available now for under $1k for anyone looking for a professional experience, and vintage lenses are surprisingly affordable. The sensors are still surprisingly improving quite a bit with each generation, but even older digital cameras can perform very well. Just by eye, I'd say something like the a7SII looks as sharp and clean as films and TV shot on digital about a decade ago. That kind of price drop is insane compared to the music industry, where the "industry leading" stuff just floats around out of reach in the $2,000+ range seemingly forever. Imagine if U47's cost $200 today!
With a simple 'dumb' adapter, I can use the cheap but surprisingly decent vintage Nikkor lenses directly on the Sony alpha cameras. The colors sometimes need a little tweaking as some of the coatings seem to have slightly discolored in some of the lenses, but the results are still remarkable.
One good source I found for reviews/information on old lenses, and not just for Nikon, is a fellow named Ken Rockwell. His site is a bit of a trip to a time when the internet had a different vibe, but the information is great and plentiful:
https://www.kenrockwell.com/
A friend of mine is into Canon lenses and cameras and has found a lot of great info on there to help him as well.
The highlight lens for me is the 85mm f/1.8. It is perfect for portraiture, and when stopped down slightly gives these characteristic hexagonal bokeh (at full open bokeh is round):
[attachment=134]
[attachment=135]
Here is one of my favorite photos I've ever taken on the 85mm, full open at f/1.8:
[attachment=136]
Rockwell claims this 85mm f/1.8 is Nikon's "worst" 85mm (albeit still very good) and yet it can still produce some pretty wildly gorgeous images, even fully open! Rockwell thinks you can get one for as low as $200 USD or so, which seems to me to be a bargain. Again, imagine if you could get such a beautiful, rich sounding microphone for just $200! Even the cheapest 'decent' ribbon mic I have found starts at $400...
It makes it seem relatively silly that some smart phones costing well over $1k take way worse photos than a lens from the 1970's adapted onto some few-years-old camera. Obviously all lenses and cameras now are wildly superior to what we were dealing with 20 years ago, a smartphone is way more compact and portable than this giant honking thing, and in all honesty, you can get great photos with literally anything, even early digital cameras like that Mavica. However the results from these old lenses are just really remarkable and beautiful in a way I can't really describe.
Apparently I read somewhere that Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was shot partially with Nikon (Nikkor) lenses, as they were the primary lenses used by war photographers and he wanted to capture that feeling. Whether or not that's true, it fits I guess, and the lenses are very sharp even today on digital equipment (when used appropriately).
Probably the most 'worthless' lens is the 80-200mm f/4.5 zoom. It is 100% manual like the other lenses, so no one really wants it, and you can't 'lock' the zoom in place (it slides with gravity if you tilt the camera too much!), but, it produces surprisingly impressive photos and costs under $100:
https://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/80-200mm-f45-n.htm
By the way, there is a small easter egg on the Versilian Studios website: on the home page, one of the photos was taken with a Sony Mavica floppy disk camera from the early 2000's! I doubt anyone really notices, as it's rather small. So, just like in music, it is all about how you use your tools, not necessarily what the tools are. Most of the other photos on the VS website and manuals were shot either with my phone or with one of these vintage lenses.
(sorry for the double-post, ran out of attachments but wanted to share a few more little things!)
The main reason I shoot in 4K is that, even when downscaled to 1080p, it is remarkably sharp. The other reason is that it's actually possible to crop into the shot up to 2x and still have 1080p resolution. This is very useful for example for a situation where you only have stationary cameras but want to "zoom" in on a performer or such. Sometimes also a very gentle zoom of 5-10% during the course of a shot adds to the sense of direction.
Here's an example from a videography project I did for a friend (I'm actually playing trombone on the right, in the center; all the cameras and mics are 100% unmanned!):
Because it's shot in 4K, I can crop in on the Left, Right, or Center camera to get sections or soloists without significant loss of quality. One can even digitally pan and zoom around at the same time! My favorite sequence starts around 16:00, as it slowly zooms in on the tenor, then has a shot panning across the choir. Gets me right in the feels every time!
This was actually a technique I learned about a few years ago, when it was described on the director's commentary, I believe either for S1 of Chuck or S1 of Eureka. I can't remember which, but they discussed how useful it was with digital to be able to crop and recompose shots in post, even with the lower resolution cameras of the day (I think they were 1440p or similar?). You can do this process even with smartphone video, but the digital noise, noise reduction, and quality of the lens limits how far you can go before it starts getting ugly.
There are other benefits; for example, in this case I couldn't remember the name of the piece or composer from a gig, but I was able to simply zoom in and take a look at the pianist's music!
[attachment=137]
[attachment=138]
Speaking of smartphones, you really have to hand it to modern manufacturers for how sharp the lenses manage to be. Here's another project where I only had two cameras at the time; I used an older iPad, which I purchased primarily for reading sheet music, with a 3rd party camera app which allows 4K/24fps recording, as the camera on the piano! Aside from it having basically no depth of field and appearing somewhat noisier, a little color grading was all it took to integrate into the other shots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFT_qkuX...Pm&index=4
[[ah, only one video allowed per post too]]
The other cameras are a 35mm covering the room, and the aforementioned 85mm at f/2 on the trombonist (you can just about make out the hexagonal bokeh on the trumpet bells, which is part of why I love recording in this space).
![[Image: DSC01248.JPG]](http://mattiaswestlund.net/misc/nex5/DSC01248.JPG)
![[Image: DSC01251.JPG]](http://mattiaswestlund.net/misc/nex5/DSC01251.JPG)
![[Image: DSC01254.JPG]](http://mattiaswestlund.net/misc/nex5/DSC01254.JPG)
![[Image: DSC01261.JPG]](http://mattiaswestlund.net/misc/nex5/DSC01261.JPG)
![[Image: DSC01263.JPG]](http://mattiaswestlund.net/misc/nex5/DSC01263.JPG)
![[Image: DSC01267.JPG]](http://mattiaswestlund.net/misc/nex5/DSC01267.JPG)
![[Image: DSC01270.JPG]](http://mattiaswestlund.net/misc/nex5/DSC01270.JPG)
![[Image: H32MB.jpg]](https://www.huntsphotoandvideo.com/images/Hoodman/zoom/H32MB.jpg)