Pete Askew
Admin
Back in January I ordered a set of CP.2 lenses from Simon at Production Gear up at Elstree (Production Gear Ltd - fantastic firm) for our video camera at work. They are are in Nikon mounts and fit to the camera (Panasonic AG AF101G - µ4/3) using a converter from MTF. I could have had them them supplied in native mount (and they can be changed by the user) but in this way they can be used on our Nikon D3s etc and if we change the main camera at any time (there is a nice new Sony coming out!) we can then just buy another adapter.
These lenses are similar in terms of optics to the stills lenses from Zeiss except that they are in cinema mounts with a standardised size, gears on the focus and aperture, no click-stops on the aperture (which is in Transmission stops rather than f-stops) and accurate distance scales. Also the focus gearing is much slower than on a stills lens to allow more accurate follow focus - keeping focus with a modern AF lens under manual control can be difficult. Unfortunately that also meant we had to buy a new matte box as the previous one was too small. But the old one will go on the GF2 / D3s setup. Frustratingly they arrived the morning I flew to Germany last time so this is the first chance I've had to have a play with them. Gorgeous would be an appropriate adjective I think!! And the focus is simply stunning. Only played with the 85mm T2.1 so far and I won't have a chance to use them properly for a week or two at least but I was so impressed with them I felt the need to share (nice though the Lumix and Voightländer lenses were, they weren't that exciting!!
So this is the 85mm T2.1 mounted on the camera (sorry about the clutter I brought it home to play with!).
And this is a closer view of the other side showing the follow-focus attached.
This shows the scales a bit better.
And this is the business end!
And to give an idea of DoF etc from these this is a shot of the external monitor (I did make a short film of the turntable spinning but it was so boring I decided I couldn't be bothered to compress and upload it - sorry).
Hopefully I'll have something that is actually interesting enough to share at some point.
These lenses are similar in terms of optics to the stills lenses from Zeiss except that they are in cinema mounts with a standardised size, gears on the focus and aperture, no click-stops on the aperture (which is in Transmission stops rather than f-stops) and accurate distance scales. Also the focus gearing is much slower than on a stills lens to allow more accurate follow focus - keeping focus with a modern AF lens under manual control can be difficult. Unfortunately that also meant we had to buy a new matte box as the previous one was too small. But the old one will go on the GF2 / D3s setup. Frustratingly they arrived the morning I flew to Germany last time so this is the first chance I've had to have a play with them. Gorgeous would be an appropriate adjective I think!! And the focus is simply stunning. Only played with the 85mm T2.1 so far and I won't have a chance to use them properly for a week or two at least but I was so impressed with them I felt the need to share (nice though the Lumix and Voightländer lenses were, they weren't that exciting!!
So this is the 85mm T2.1 mounted on the camera (sorry about the clutter I brought it home to play with!).
And this is a closer view of the other side showing the follow-focus attached.
This shows the scales a bit better.
And this is the business end!
And to give an idea of DoF etc from these this is a shot of the external monitor (I did make a short film of the turntable spinning but it was so boring I decided I couldn't be bothered to compress and upload it - sorry).
Hopefully I'll have something that is actually interesting enough to share at some point.
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