Portland Lens Test 2011 BTS

Portland Lens Test 2011 BTS

Tim Whitcomb of Indent Studios hosted a myriad of B-List lenses for testing on an army of RED Epic cameras. I say B-List, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t bad lenses. I simply mean that they are less known than lenses like the Angenieux Optimo series or the Zeiss Master Primes or even the Cooke S4 or 5i series. It was perhaps a collection of the rest of the lenses that shooters are curious about but may not want to invest $20k-$50k just to try out some exotic glass. The test included lenses from manufacturers such as Zeiss, Illumina, Cooke, Leica, RED, and Uniq Optics. The testing included three different stations, each with it’s own purpose. The lenses all rotated from station to station in a sort of ballet. I have to say, everyone that participated in this test was extremely professional and made everything look so easy. I certainly couldn’t have pulled something like this off. I’m not going to go over test results as I haven’t even seen most of them myself. Tim will be releasing the results, probably through REDUser in the near future which I will link to when it’s available. Regardless of the results, participating in the test was great fun. I was able to meet a lot of great people and finally put some faces to the names REDUser, Twitter, and email have provided over the past few years. I’ll put up a list of full credits once I have all the details. But for now, enjoy a few BTS photos. Continue reading “Portland Lens Test 2011 BTS”

Still Lens Mount Swapping

Still Lens Mount Swapping

The DSLR Revolution is in full swing at the moment and everyone is scrambling to get the glass they love on the camera they are stuck with. It doesn’t sound too difficult to simply change a piece of metal, but there are a lot of things to consider when attempting to change a mount. After-all, lenses are a precision tool, naturally. Lens and camera manufacturers all have their own mount system which specifies a flange depth, the distance from the mount flange to the film/sensor plane. When this number is accurate, the image that the lens produces falls on the sensor in perfect focus. Move it forward or backward by the smallest amount (.0005″) and your collimation will be completely off, throwing out your focus marks and destroying the accuracy of a lens, especially a zoom lens. All of the different SLR camera manufacturers had a similar theory and design, but just slightly different numbers for the flange depth. Wouldn’t it be great if they all agreed on a standardized mount that would allow any lens to be used on any camera? Yeah, it would be great. But that’s not how it works.

Another angle of the Leica-R 35mm f/1.4 Summilux with Leitax Eos mount installed.

Continue reading “Still Lens Mount Swapping”