Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
One of the great things about photography is the wide range of available equipment. Particularly with lenses. But this can also leave people wondering what might be right for them, particularly as they can often overlap in many ways.
To help, we take a closer at three lenses that can all shoot at 105mm: a fast prime, macro, and a zoom.
Venus Optics keeps expanding its family of lenses. A week after launching the L-mount version of its four lenses, the company is adding Canon RF and Nikon Z option to two more. The 65mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO is now available for Nikon Z, whereas Canon R shooters will be able to get the 11mm f/4.5 FF RL lens.
Panasonic has just launched the Lumix S 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 MACRO O.I.S. lens. It leaked in the lens roadmap last year, but now it’s officially here and ready for preorders. It looks like a pretty versatile lens that lets you shoot the subjects really far from you, but those really close too, so lets’ see what it has to offer.
Blackmagic Design has announced the new Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro. It’s a full-frame version of the regular Pocket 6K, but with some features of the URSA Mini Pro. Blackmagic says that this isn’t just an incremental update to the Pocket 6K and is a completely new design, which is a bit beefier, with a whole bunch of new features.
One new feature, resolving a big complaint of both the Pocket 4K and Pocket 6K is that it has a tilting touchscreen LCD. Yup, that’s right, it’s not fixed anymore, meaning you can easily get those low down and high up shots without always having to resort to an external monitor.
Sony has posted a video to YouTube with w premiere set for February 23rd at 10am Eastern, (3pm UK time). While they haven’t officially named the camera, the “New Alpha” kind of gives it away, given the Alpha logo on the leaked photos of the video-oriented FX3.
By all reports right now, the FX3 is basically looking to be an A7S III in a slightly different body, possibly geared more towards Sony’s new Airpeak drone platform. But exactly what advantages it may offer over the A7S III, and what it may lack, remains to be seen.
Cosina has announced three new Voigtlander 35mm f/2 lenses. One of them is the Voigtlander Ultron Vintage Line 35mm F2 Aspherical Type II VM for Leica M, available in Black or Silver and the other two are Leica M and Sony E mount versions of the Voigtlander Apo-Lanthar 35mm F2 Aspherical VM.
The horrendously named Voigtlander Ultron Vintage Line 35mm F2 Aspherical Type II VM (we’ll just call it Ultron 2 from here on out) is an update to the existing Ultron 35mm F2 Aspherical lens. It’s designed to be small and compact, which is the opposite of the Apo-Lanthar 35mm F2, which seems to strive for image quality above all else.
We all know that photography is not a cheap hobby. But hey, just because the gear is expensive, it doesn’t have to be that expensive. There are some tips and tricks that will save you tons of money when buying gear, and Caleb Pike of DSLR Video Shooter will show you as many as ten of them in his latest video.
Venus Optics has released quite a lot of interesting lenses over the past few years. And now, four of the most popular and most unusual ones are available in L-mount. Venus Optics has just launched the L-mount version of two wide-angle lenses and two macro lenses: 4mm f/2.8 Fisheye, 9mm f/2.8 Zero-D, 24mm f/14 2X Macro Probe, and 25mm f/2.8 2.5-5X Ultra Macro.
I said I wasn’t going to post any more of these. The “winner” in pretty much all cases is obvious. Or is it? There is no doubt that a $6,000 flagship DSLR (even if it is a generation old) is going to hammer a smartphone (of any resolution) when it comes to absolute image quality, dynamic range and all the other reasons we buy flagship bodies. But does it always really matter?
This video from photographer Kevin Raposo puts the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra’s 108-megapixel sensor up against the 21.5-megapixel Canon 1DX Mark II in this rather interesting (and quite thoughtful) comparison and, well, when you look at the images scaled for a video side-by-side they’re actually pretty close.
Reveni Labs, the company responsible for the tiny on-camera light meter for old SLRs that don’t have one built-in is back. And they’ve brought a new meter with them. This time it’s a still-tiny-but-not-quite-as-tiny-as-the-original-meter spot meter – once a very common tool amongst film photographers, particularly medium and large format landscape shooters, and one that’s still built into just every DSLR and mirrorless camera today.
And, yes, there are companies like Sekonic still producing excellent spot meters, but they’re not exactly cheap. Even older, used ones can still be fairly expensive. Reveni Labs’ goal with this is to print the price down to a more manageable amount for those who don’t need the advanced capabilities of more expensive meters.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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