Starting a new series of blog posts called “Gear P*rn”…the O omitted so they don’t get blocked in certain countries and certain work places! ?
First up is something I would never have thought possible. A sexy lens adaptor. Metabones famous for their Speedboosters and other lens adaptors, have made quite possibly their finest lens adaptor ever, and it’s most definitely for the more high-end because it’s for Sony FZ mount cameras.
If you don’t know what that is, then it’s the mount first introduced on the under-appreciated Sony F3 but also on the excellent F5 and F55s.
It’s a huge mount that can be adapted for anything that can cover the sensor, as the sensor is practically level with it….well almost! There are a couple of Canon EF adaptors out there. The one I have for my F55 is the Optitek ProLock which costs around £1500. It’s pretty good. Communicates with the camera well and supports IS and iris values are displayed in the EVF. How you change the iris is a big fiddly though. Two little buttons that are a bit hard to get to. You cannot change the iris via a dial on the camera like E mount Sony lens adaptors.
The Metabones one is a BEAST. It’s way bigger and much heavier. It feels very solid and professional. The money feature of this, though, is the cine-style iris. Marked from F1 to F32, it’s a beautiful smooth iris on the outside but optically it can only be as smooth as the electronics of the Canon lens let you. It seems to be about 1/8th of a stop increments, which is better than the 1/3rd or a stop a Canon camera gives you!
The iris shows F1 to F32…before you ask, it won’t suddenly make all your lenses F1! The iris only starts engaging when the dial reaches your maximum F-Stop and stops doing anything at your minimum. Very clever.
It supports IS, display of the iris in the EVF and even auto iris if you want that.
This is a truly gorgeous piece of gear and true gear p*rn. Now they just need to make their E-mount adaptors this hot!
Next up is a quick look at the Lumapad V2 which is currently on Kickstarter. I received a couple of demo units last week to review. One tungsten and one daylight. I backed the V1 Lumapads and they are excellent lights but design wise look a bit ugly. These are much better, look great and a bit of steal at $699 for the bigger of the two lights (there is a smaller light called the little guy on the Kickstarter)
I haven’t had the chance to use the ones I have been sent on a shoot, but I did try them out at home, and the light quality is very impressive. Definitely better than the V1 and the output is also impressive.
I own quite a few lights, including some quite expensive ones, and this is pretty good and certainly performs better than I would expect for $700 light. My Zylight Z8 is an exceptional light but it’s $2400, though that’s also got a fresnel lens and an astonishing CRI rating of 97. Truly one of the most exceptional quality lights out there which I cannot recommend enough.
But if your budget cannot stretch to that, then these may well be worth looking into.
The bigger light is 10,000 lumens and is fully dimmable and comes in either daylight of tungsten. Colour coded just in case you make a schoolboy error on set! Guess which of these two lights is daylight…don’t be confused by the white balance of this photo!
Their CRI rating is pretty high, especially for the tungsten one. I personally have no way of verifying that their lights are of the CRI index of 90 for the tungsten and 80+ for the daylight but that is what they are quoting.
What I haven’t had a chance to try out are their remote phosphor ones. I own a half-dozen remote phosphor lights. 1 BBS Lighting Area 48, 1 Cineo Lighting‘s Tru Color LS, Maverick, Matchstix and two Matchboxes. All amazing lights with incredible light quality. I love the way you simply change the phosphor in front of the LEDs to change the temperature and get perfect light output for each one.
You can see two videos shot with some of these lights a bit further down the post.
Lumapad’s remote phosphor light goes for $900 with either tungsten or daylight phosphor. What many I am sure will find frustrating, which they need to fix, is they don’t make an option to buy this light with both phosphors. After all, that’s one of the key benefits of this type of light. No loss of output when going tungsten or daylight, which happens if you have a daylight LED and put some CTO on for tungsten or a tungsten LED and put on some CTB to make it daylight.
Check out the Kickstarter here for more info!
That’s it for this first Gear P*rn post…and if you are really getting aroused by this I would seek help!
My Dad from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
Call the Cleaner! Sony RX100 IV 250fps, 500fps & 1000fps from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
