It's time for crazy experiments in the Media Division… today we redefine what it means to shoot “wide open” that means we are going to walk in the Footsteps of Stanley Kubrick and we are going to shoot with ultrafast lenses…. That means lenses, that are faster than f1… right down to f0.7 Some lenses are bigger than others and a f0.7 lens gathers 4 times more light than an already fast f1.4 lens … that means amazing low light capabilities, dreamy bokeh, and razor thin Depths of field. We are going to take you to the dark side of the moon the realm of the legendary Zeiss Planar f0.7 lens and explain how it helped Staley Kubrick to shot Barry Lyndon with nothing but candlelight. We are going to go to the basics to explore the possibilities and to expose the limitations of ultrafast
lenses. We look into the possibilities that you have to shoot ultrafast yourself, Including the monster of light gathering – the Zeiss Biotar f0.73 for the adventurous among you. We show you how we build a working f0.7 system and take you along on our shooting, where we put our speed king to the test and compare the
more practical options. We compare also compare shooting ultrafast lenses with shooting at high ISO and of course… using both in combination. last but not least… we are going to explore the budget option… using a speed booster to achieve speeds below f1 Whether you are a filmmaker or a photographer
this should be interesting, so, get some popcorn, lean back, and “open wide” …… The entrance pupil of a lens in combination
with its focal length determine how much light that lens can gather. The wider a lens can
open up, the brighter the image it projects can be. We use the analogy of speed to describe this quality. A lens that gathers a lot of light is a fast lens. Normal “fast” lenses usually top out at f1.4 and there are lenses that reach speeds of f1… f1 is one stop faster than f1.4, that means, that on the same focal length, the entrance pupil of the
lens is twice as big and it shines twice the amount of light on the sensor or negative.
We call lenses that are at f1 or even below that… ultrafast. As always, nature was way ahead of us with fast vision. Nocturnal predators like the owl combine highly sensitive retinas with
a fast optics. While a human eye is rated around f2.1 wide open… the eye of an owl
is about f1.3 and admits more than twice the amount of light, even though they are considerably
smaller. Ultrafast lenses are a bit like the unicorns
of lenses… as for the classic full frame SLR and DSLR systems … there aren’t any.
We assumed that they where where extremely hard to design and too expensive. This idea
was mostly fuelled by the legendary Zeiss Planar f0.7 and maybe the Leica Notilux f0.95. Shooting ultrafast is always a bit challenging
for the filmmaker and his wallet … but… if you are willing to be a bit adventurous,
there are affordable options out there. In the later parts of this video, we show and
compare some of those Wikipedia has an illustrious list of fast
lenses on their page about lens speeds. Here you’ll find lenses that are f1 and faster,
and the larger the format, the rarer and more expensive they get. We will explain later,
why it is easier to build fast lens for smaller formats. The Leica Noctilux f0.95 is deemed the best ultrafast lens that one could actually buy
… for a whooping 11.000 dollars Canons 50mm f1 is the fastest lens around
that has a long flange… and could therefor still be used with a focal reducer… for 5000$ it can be yours… used of course, as Canon stopped to produce it.
Lately, there has been some new contenders… Nikon has released the Noct … a really good looking full frame lens with f0.95 for an eye watering 9.000 dollars The
good news is that there have been some relatively affordable options with the Kipon Ibelux f0.85 for 1.500$ and the SLR Magic 25mm T0.95 for only 500$
we are going to test both of those… Another possibility is to go for vintage lenses
here we are going to try one of the fastest lenses in the world, the Zeiss Biotar 100mm
f0.73… a lens used in x-ray machines And of course, we are going to talk about
the “brute force” option… boosting a fast lens below f1using focal reducers
For this test we are going to use another vintage lens, a Canon FD 55mm f1.2 All the lenses faster than f1.0 have one thing
in common… they are all for systems with a short flange… that means systems, where
the rear optical elements are very close to the negative or sensor… so, rangefinder
and mirrorless cameras. An interesting fact that you should keep in
mind. The most famous ultrafast lens… or maybe
even most famous lens in general, is probably the 50mm Zeiss Planar f0.7… a lens shrouded
in legends. It was designed in 1966 by Carl Zeiss in Germany
for NASA to be used on the Apollo missions… but there is no information available wich
mission the lens actually flew, and non of the images it took are available to the
public. We can tell you this much:
If you see the fancy photos from the surface, these have not been shoot with the Planar
f0.7 and it would have been pretty close to being useless, because the direct sunlight
requires the lenses to be stopped down quite a bit, also, a deep DoF was desired. Here
NASA used another Zeiss lens, the 60mm Biogon f5.6. The Zeiss Planar f0.7 was used on a modified Hasselblad camera that remained in orbit and was used to photograph the night side of the Moon… not the dark side of the moon… that
is a Pink Floyd album. Let us explain that briefly. The moon is in a gravitational look with earth, meaning that we always see the same side that we call the “near side”. Just like earth,
halve of the Moon is illuminated by the sun. As the Moon orbits around the earth in one
month, you have two weeks of sunlight followed by two weeks of night. The side of the Moon that always faces away from earth is called the far side, and is only observable from
the Moons orbit. As the moons phase doesn’t change drastically during the time of a mission, halve of the Moon is only illuminated by the light reflected by the earth and by starlight. As Earth is not as a good as a reflector as
the Moon is, that is not a lot of light. So, either you come again during an other
Moon phase, or you will need a very fast lens… enter the 50mm Zeiss Planar f0.7 Zeiss only built 10 lenses… of which they
kept one… and you can see it in a museum if you ever come to southern Germany.
The Planar f0.7 was fitted on a specially modified Hasselblad camera.
This lets us make one assumption. The Planar was actually designed for medium format cameras, making its speed even more impressive. The legendary Moon lens and its capabilities in low light attracted Stanley Kubrick who planed to shoot some scenes of 1975s “Barry Lyndon” only illuminated by candles… creating a unique realistic and yet poetic
look that won an Oskar for cinematography and is still considered one of the most iconic
visuals in the medium today. With modern camera sensors it doesn’t seem
to be an overly hard task to shoot with only candle light but in 1975 the film negative
had only 100 ISO!!! Now try to light that with candles. To be fair, Kubrick & and his DoP john Allcot pulled some tricks… they pushed the film to 200 ISO during development and used special candles that had 3 wicks… burning three times brighter than a normal candle would.
Also, they used metal defectors under the ceiling primarily to protect the delicate
architecture from the extra hot 3 wicked candles, but it also provided a boost to the candle
light. . Still, even with the fastest cine lenses of his time, which where around f1,
he still needed twice the amount of light to get acceptable exposure. And this is where the Planar f0.7 was the saving grace… and a huge pain on many levels. First and foremost: It requires a flange of about 4mm to focus to infinity. To put that in perspective – a Sony E-Mount has 18mm flange. Of course, Kubrick filmed with a classic 35mm
camera, a Mitchel BNC, and these cameras have a rolling shutter and a mirror for the viewfinder
between the lens and the negative. Also, the Planar was way too big to fit into the mount.
A seemingly impossible task… but Kubrick wasn’t somebody who would take no for an answer. He had the Mitchel cut out in the front to fit the lens, he altered the shutter
so it would only require 3mm to operate and he got rid of the mirror… which of course
made the operator blind to whatever he was shooting A TV camera was placed at a 90-degree angle to the Mitchel and was monitored on a TV screen mounted above the camera lens scale. A grid placed over the TV screen gave the 1st AC critical distance information One of many times where Kubrick didn’t only advance cinema with his unique way of telling a story, but also by reinventing the gear
he used. Barry Lyndon is by no means the
only example for shooting with candle light. Later films like Amadeus shot concert scenes
using primarily candles to light the scenes… this time not only because of the visual theme,
but because the historical concert hall in Prague had no electric wiring, and the government
refused the film crew to lay high voltage cables, afraid it could cause damage to the
priceless building. To cope with the fire hazard, so many fireman had to be in the room, that they where impossible
to hide… the solution: they where simply put in costume and used as extras…. Brilliant! Miloš Forman had it much easier than Kubrick though… by the time Amadeus was produced, the film
stock had become considerably more sensitive and 250 ISO stock was used for those scenes. The advances in technology and higher sensitivity
in digital sensors, allow us to shoot in candle light with less effort… but high ISO delivers
a completely different look compared to ultrafast lenses … we will talk about that later.
Going back to the Planar and the stony road it was to adapt the lens to a film camera. Why did the Planar have a flange of only 4mm?
Wouldn’t it have been easier to modify the lens instead of the camera???? This is where we go into the Basics of lens design and lens speed bare with us, it is worth to know
and you are going to need that information for our experiment. The f-number of an optical system is calculated
by this formula: f-number = f/D The “f” stands is the focal length of
the lens, the “D” is the diameter of the entrance pupil. While the focal length is
pretty straight forward and usually written on the lens, the entrance pupil needs some
explanation. Quite often, you hear that the entrance pupil is the diameter of the lenses
front element … often you hear it is the diameter of the IRIS itself what counts… and neither
is correct. The entrance pupil is how large the IRIS opening appears to be, when viewed
through the optical system it is in.…… and that is by no means the same as the actual
size. Let us show you. These are two Mamiya medium format lenses.
On the left is a 80mm f1.9 and on the the right is a 45mm f2.8
On a long focal length, the entrance pupil looks large. Removing the front element reveals
a smaller Iris than the appearance suggested. On a short focal length, the entrance pupil
looks small. Removing the front element reveals a larger Iris than the appearance suggested. This is the reason, why wide angle lenses
are not always ridiculously fast when you apply the f-number formula… as both values
become smaller simultaneously, the resulting brightness remains in the same ballpark. But how does this relate to the flange distance
at all? That has to do with the refraction of air.
And this refraction sets an absolute limit. I don’t want to bore with to much detail
here… but this formula shows the limit close to f1.0 for systems with longer flanges like
EF, F, PL whereas lenses for rangefinder and mirrorless cameras can be faster You can think of it like this. This would
be a 50mm f1.0 lens on a EF mount. A faster lens would have larger entrance pupil. The
mount would need a larger opening, and infinity focus would wander to the front.
One way to achieve a working systems, is to move the sensor forward… basically what
mirrorless systems do. An f0.7 lens would have an 1.4 time larger entrance pupil requiring
such a short flange, that there is no room for a conventional mount
Of course, faster lenses can be used with long flanges if infinity focus ability is
not required. But in this case, a lens is not branded as such, the maximum aperture
must reach infinity focus. Due to the refraction off air, f0.7 seems
to be a practical limit while f0.5 is the theoretical road block As this will come up… on the Wikipedia list
of fast lenses you will find an American Optical 81mm f0.38... that seems to defy what we just
shown you. There is very little information to find about
this lens but the “Solid Schmidt Mirror lens” from 1939 seems to be a Solid-Glass
Camera with an integrated mirror lens that avoids the limitation by eliminating the air
from the system. As there has been no obvious further development since, we will assume
that it was not worth it. There is one more lens that will pop up in
the comments for sure…. the Carl Zeiss Super-Q-Gigantar 40mm f0.33. It was never a working lens but a marketing stunt that might have
had the right numbers to give f0.33 on paper, but it was never able to produce a usable
image. Zeiss wanted to show the absurdity in hunting after ever faster lenses and the
“Q” in the name stands for “Quatsch”… the German word for "nonsense". Our take away from this is, that a lens has
to get physically larger and larger with faster speeds, especially with longer focal length
and larger formats. As a larger lens requires much more glass…
the lenses get heavy … really heavy… May we introduce to you the star destroyer
of lenses The Zeiss Biotar R 100mm f0.73 It dwarfs even a very fast lens like the SLR
Magic 25mm T0.95 and It has a huge front element that seems to bend space
time when you look through it. It weights a hefty 5.8 kg. So, if you are
not running a full fledged Alexa, you are going to mount the camera to the lens and
not the other way around. As usual in industrial The lens is designed to fit specifically
into this environment. There is no iris as these lenses are supposed to operate at maximum
aperture. There are no moving elements for focussing, and there is no mount in the conventional
sense. The backside is just a flat piece of glass…
but don’t be mislead. this is not some kind of protection glass, but the back of a massive
plano convex lens that again is part of a doublet. It was built in 1964 around the same time
as the Nasa Planar. As an industrial lens with limited practical applications you can
buy them for somewhat reasonable prices and ebay has listings at about 500$ at this time. The ground glass from a large format camera
makes the lens projection visible, and its brightness is very promising.
Changing the distance of objects reveals the focal plane that the lens generates for the
given flange distance between the ground glass and the rear lens element
When we alter that flange, we can demonstrate how we are going to focus the lens. When we increase the flange, we can focus on objects that are very close… When we reduce the flange we can focus ob
objects further away… the candles are about 3 meters away… and here you can see that
focussing to 3 meters away already requires a flange distance of something tike 10mm rendering
any traditional mount or helicoid useless. The ground glass also allows us to demonstrate
the coverage … this is 4x5’ large format, this is IMAX and we see that that is covered,
all smaller formats are subsequently covered… to put it in perspective, this is Full Frame,
this is 4-perf super 35… that’s the format Barry Lyndon was shot on, and this is micro
four third. The “R” indicated that the Biotar is a
so called “X-Ray” lens. The R stems from the german word for X-Ray … Röntgenstrahlung.
The Wikipedia list of fast lenses has a section for X-Ray lenses, and you will find, that
the Biotar is the fastest of these lenses… and the biggest.
Let us explain briefly what a X-Ray lens is. First of all – Don’t worry, these lenses
are not radioactive as long as they don’t use thoriated glass, and even than it wouldn’t
be harmful. These lenses where not used to transmit x-rays.
X-ray machines shine electromagnetic radiation through a body. As the bones are denser than
soft tissue, they block more of the radiation and the skeleton casts a shadow. As x-rays
are invisible a fluorescent screen is used to produce a temporal image. This image was
then photographed by an ordinary camera in the system. The faster the lens of that camera
is, the shorter and less intense the x-ray burst needed to be – being less harmful
to the patient. Many more modern X-ray machines used smaller CCD-sensors like they are used in video cameras to show a permanent image instantaneously. Of course,
these lenses don’t cover Full Frame or even super35 sensors. So, if you should go hunting
for x-ray lenses, be very careful with those. You will find some advice in the description
of this video. As we want to use the Biotar in in a filming
environment, we will need to find a way to safely mount it to a rig We modded a Lanparte matte box to fit the
front of the lens, the back is held up by a Lanparte lens support that also prevents
the lens from sliding out of the matte box. We happen to have to most sensitive cine cam on the market right now. The Kinefinity MAVO LF A very cool feature is that you can remove the mount. It has dual native ISO with 800 and 5120 More importantly, it has a full frame sensor
to get as much from the massive image projection as possible. By the way… the red surface
you can see is actually not the sensor but the OLPF. Bayer-Sensors require the softening
effect of such a filter to avoid Moire… the filter appears to be red, as it is also
a hot-mirror, that means that it reflects infrared light. This was shot with the Biotar with the flange
of e-mount… the focal plane is about 50cm away, and with the 100mm focal length you
can barely fit a human face in the frame … which is why you often see x-ray lenses used for
very very blurry macro photography. So, how do we achieve the ultra short flange?
Just like Kubrick found out the hard way. It is all about modding…… not the lens……
but the camera. What follows is not for the faint of heart
and we advise you not to do this yourself. To achieve infinite focus with the Biotar,
we are going to mod the the camera in a quite drastic way… we are going to pull the
sensor out of the camera. So, if you are a bit anal about dust on your sensor, you might want to pop out
for a minute. And if you think that this is somehow wrong or that we hate our cameras…
that is not the case. We just like to be bold and experiment, for ourselves, and for you.
Like Kubrick, we don’t take no for an answer. We remove the submount from the camera and
remove the OLPF so you can see, the OLPF just in itself would have been thicker than
the required 4mm. Now we detach the sensor holder... and the sensor unit… after reattaching
the heat sink with gaff we pull the sensor through the opening of the sensor holder and
attach the sensor from the outside. We are now lacking an OLPF and basic filtration
of Infrared. We can live without an OLPF as a wide open lens is very soft in itself but
not without filtartion. Of course, we could use large hot mirrors in front of the lens,
but those would not be designed to the specific needs of the sensor, and most probably ruin
the colors recorded by the camera. During our research, we came across Kolari Vision,
a company specialised in infrared conversion, Infrared and UV filters, custom mods,
consulting, and more. And they have a product range of very thin filters arrays that are
designed to fit a specific sensor. Why would anybody need these? They are designed
to replace much thicker OEM filters and allow to achieve better performance of cameras using
wide vintage lenses. wide vintage lenses are not tele centric, meaning that rays hit the
sensor at a quite angle, now the travel distance behind the OLPF is not conform, and the edges
of the image start to get blurry and smeary. A very thin filter array can prevent that. Kolari Vision was kind enough to support our
experiment and sent us a filter free of charge… thanks a lot Kolari, we appreciate your “where
no man has gone before” attitude… If you are a friend of vintage glass, a Kolari filter
might give you edge to edge sharpness you are looking for If you interested in that or in infrared and
UV-imaging in general… please visit their website under Kolarivision.com… I will also
put that link in the description. To avoid newton rings and scratching the sensor,
the Kolari filter is attached leaving a small space between surfaces… using double sided
tape. As this procedure is quite nerve-racking and
I used the wrong tape leaving some residue around the sensor surface, I am not going
to repeat this process on camera… we will find a cleaner to get rid of the residue,
but it doesn’t affect the sensor performance at all.
We than used the same tape to attach the Kolari Filter to a simple clear filter for protection
and attached everything with gaff. A solution that is not pretty but surprisingly solid…
and it worked. Just to be clear, everything we did here is
easily referable and we did so several times over the corse of this project. Most part
of this episode have been shot with the Mavo after demodding, so the camera is fully functional. The flange can vary from 110mm for close focus
to 4mm for infinity focus. To be able to focus with precision, we modded a Manfrotto Macro
slider. We had the bold plan to make the slider remote controllable. Maciej is SFX technician
at The Marmalade… this guy… and he wares sunshades because he is looking into an 18K
HMI, and he did a phantastic job to actually build a system from scratch, 3D printing and
all… absolutely next level… unfortunately, the Corona Crisis led to a lockdown and Maciej was not able to be with us and attach the controller … so, we had to use this little
work of art manually. Anyway… thank you so much man! Now we attach the whole unit to our rig and
voila… a system that can focus from close to infinity and is as practical as it gets
with this monstrosity… while it is heavy and the depths of field is non existent we will still do some handheld work with it… because we are just……… us. After getting through all this, Its time to
show you what we got… this is “The Mission”… shot completely it Candlelight at f0.7 and
ISO 800 We now going to take you a bit backstage and tell you about the problems and the solutions, during the shoot we will also give you a bit of our resume,
after that we are not done at all, we will test some affordable and practical ultrafast
lenses in the Candle set… as well as taking one into a ultra low light situation to pair
it with ultra high ISO But first some Channel related stuff… If you like our work, please like this video
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Division… and be a part of the chocolate factory for filmmakers. Special thanks go out to Lyndon Gaule… one
of the Directors of the Marmalade. He has been an essential partner for this episode
not only by being our model for the lens test but with everything from set design to the
table top shots right up to post effects… my favourite is the one right at the end of
this episode… you will see. Lyndon even took some personal loss in the
production of this episode… Sh..............it
It healed immideately Thanks a lot Lyndon, you are one of a kind…
and I am pretty sure you are a Vampire. Is this there because or just because? Well, it is there because Obviously, we have a problem with light spilling in from the sides ...and we have a very very elegant solution for this tataaaaa To share a bit of our insights and what to
expect shooting at f0.7 we are now going to take you backstage on our shoot. First we play around with the position of
candle and camera until we find something that we like and something that the lens likes.
Unexpected was a strange effect, making practical light sources wonky when in focus… an effect
that gets worse with greater subject distance. So, this is obviously something that Kubrick didn't have to fight The Planar doesn't do this "candle out of focus effect" So, when a light source shines directly into the lens It will get... from a certain distance very wired out of focus effects everything else is quite beautiful this has to do with the lens design of the Biotar, so the Planar is definitely a different lens in that area An expected problem was dealing with the extremely
shallow depth of field Especially in close ups, there is a definite
difference between the tip of an eyelash and the iris of an eye… it's like the difference of your hair here and here Even when you move just a millimetre or something like that when you are this close focus you are going to be in trouble try to stay on the same focal plane Lyndon: ah... thats a little difficult So, you just move sideways... thats exactly what Kubrick had to do with his people A simple trick is to
put a monitor close by and let the talent do the micro focus by moving back and forth…
one millimetre at the time . Acting and movement should generally be designed to be on the same focal plane. One old trick for otherwise complex shots
is, to focus on the end position and to act in reverse. Do we have.... yeah, we have critical focus? OK... and go! Right... you don't see that you walk backwards.... good call We can then simply revers the clip in post... and presto! you hit critical focus in a forward movement. Ah.... Can you Walk with the lights in the back... through the scene Because then it looks like you are walking Another Trick is to have your subject stand still while his surroundings are moving and
the camera is panning Nikolas: He keeps walking and the candle just stops..... (laughter) (camera beeps).... and go! Nikolas: This was the night Dorian came back and saw his picture... ... and he lifted the candle... and he saw what time... and grief.... did to his........ face Actually it is super interesting what happens in the corners of the lens ...with the light... how it breaks ja... that cool Shooting handheld with this setup is pure
masochism… thats why we had to try it The system is so heavy that it requires quite some muscle power to just hold it. The vast majority of the shots are out of focus… something only feasible with digital cameras imagine the waste of negative if you where shooting with film. The talent has to maintain the distance to the camera as good as possible. I love it... because it is very unusual If you put this lens on... you want something unusual Yeah, it needs to have character... it needs to have a little character ...this is quite a lot of character is the focus in? I am actually... look at your hair It is in focus... it is just blooming... lust like putting a ProMist on Yeah.. a ProMist like .... five (density) Yeah, it has a ProMist quality about it But if you zoom in... which you can still in the playback You should at least then you will see that... even when I go in You still have..... Lyndon: Yeah, the focus is there... Nikolas: focus is there Of course, we wanted to see, how a fast system
fairs against an ultrafast system This should give you an idea. All our making of shots have been shot with
a black magic Ursa Mini Pro G2… a camera that is not great in low light, but can give good results up to 1600 ISO with a f1.4 prime. When we go down to just one candle …even
at 1600 ISO, it is a bit dark… now, compare the exact same shot with the 10.240 ISO and f0.7 on the Mavo… you can already see on the display, that, if anything we are other exposing…
it looks like we the looking into a tiny HMI light... just that that HMI is a candle. On the bigger budget productions, the fabulous Wolf Hall shows that an Arri Alexa and a fast prime can produce beautiful images … even
if j ust very few candles in the scene… and sometimes even only one… ok… two. And of course, there is always the option
to supplement candlelight, like it has been done since the dawn of cinema. The look is
very different to Barry Lyndon though… the ultrafast lens produces a softer, more poetic look, that is a nice reminiscence of oil paintings from the same time… a look that is just
not replicable in post. Of course, ultrafast lenses are not suitable for everyday use, they are special lenses for very special jobs and not practical at all. But, like so often…
a stony road lead to interesting results, like the f0.7 scenes in Barry Lyndon lead
to an Oskar for cinematography Ultrafast lenses can give you a tool to tell
your story in a unique way… even without modding your camera Besides the usual dream, drug, and flashback scenes… how about the story of a man with Alzheimers disease… and he looses his ability to recognise faces… you can show that with faces that fall
in an out of focus using a super shallow depth of field You might have realized that non of the shot in our sample movie actually used infinity focus that doesn’t mean it can’t…
it can, but we think it looks horrible… the lens was designed for close focus, und
this is where it shines. And that’s why we decided not to use any. I want to thank my namesake Niklas Eichten
from The Marmalade for filming our shooting. Nicely done man. As our f0.7 setup is beyond anything practical,
we want to take a look at lenses that can give you the ultrafast look and light gathering
abilities much simpler… even on a budget. These options are all way below f1… just
not for full frame, but for super s35 and MFT formats And, of course there is always the option to use a focal reducer. We are going to put three lenses to the test,
the Kipon Ibelux 40mm f0.85 the SLR Magic 25mm T0.95
and a vintage Canon FD Full frame lens with f1.2… boosted below f1 Let us start with biggest and most expensive lens in the trio, the Kipon Ibelux 40mm f0.85 Mark II It is designed to cover super35 sensors, and
at this time, it might be the faster lens you can buy for the format
The first time you pick up this lens, you immediately realise that this is not like
any of your other lenses… it is surprisingly heavy weighting 1181 grams and you can feel
the sheer amount of glass that is necessary to get to f0.85 on super35
The lens is fully manual and has a very sturdy metal built. Unusual is the metal lens cap
that screws on, and the that the iris ring in front of the focus ring. As fast lenses
tend to flare, the lens has a built in metal sunhood It is available in Sony E, Leica L,
Fuji X, EOS M, and Micro Four thirds mounts and costs around 1.500$ We have the Mark II version, but by the time
you watch this, the Mark III version with improved mechanics should be available. We think that the mechanics on the Mark II are already very good When shooting with the lens wide open, the
first thing you realise is, that it produces strong oval flares with practical lights. An interesting effect, but if you have many sources like in a candle light setup, these
flares can easily overwhelm the scene. Close focus is 75cm… quite far. The flares go away when you close the lens down to f1.4. At this speed it is only as fast as normal fast primes, but very sharp. Wide open, images look much better with indirect light… the images are extremely bright and the highlights blooming is relatively low for such a high
speed… making the IBELUX the perfect lens for ultra low light shootings, when combined
with a sensitive camera. To try that in a real life scenario, we waited
for the night to fall. While a city is never really pitch black, the path that we are filming
here is so dark, that one has to be cautious not to stumble over things…
Let’s put this into perspective … this is what an iPhone7 + can “see” with this kind of light… something close to nothing. And this is what a Sigma 18–35 boosted to
f1.2 can do on a GH5 … with a whooping 12.800 ISO we get something like an image… that
is beyond anything useable or repairable Now. let there be light! Quite impressive… and if you think, hey
you just shot that earlier when the sun was still up, the light that the jogger is wearing
is the dead giveaway that that is not the case. Again we see the typical flares that
the IBELUX produces when a light shines into it Just illuminating my face with the 7 inch
display mounted on the camera gives us already a good enough exposure to film something that looks decent… The phones flashlight overexposes by a landslide. Bokeh looks beautiful and the sharpness in this lighting condition is nothing short of breathtaking. The Mavo
does a phantastic job even at 10.240 ISO with very low noise in a practically dark scene. No noise reduction was applied and all we have is a mild film like grain. Some will say… yeah, nice… and why don’t
you light your scene noob… I can best imagine using this lens and camera combination in war zones or filming large nocturnal predators, or for low profile documentary spying on criminals… so dear questioner.… please… light your scene... I can’t wait to see the results. Next up is the SLR Magic 25mm T0.95 cine III It is tiny in comparison… no wonder, as
this lens will only cover Micro four third sensors and is only available in this mount.
Talking about only… it weights only 455 grams. It is designed to fit into filming
environments with geared aperture and focus rings. It is also measured in T-stops instead
of F-stops, taking transmission light loss into account… there is no f-stop spec available,
but expect something like f0.92 for better comparability. As the MAVO LF has no optional Micro Four
Thirds mount, we tested the SLR Magic on a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K. We where instantly in love with what this camera combo can do... the images look reasonably sharp and
the highlights blooming is very controlled even at maximum aperture. Flares are nice
and not overwhelming in a candlelight scenes There is really nothing not to like about
this lens, except the short focus throw, that doesn’t feel right in the otherwise cine
centric design approach, closed down, it looks just as nice. Of course, it is considerable
less bright compared to the Ibelux. But at the price point of only 500$, this lens is a must have for Micro for Third owners. The close focus is very impressive at only 25cm making the SLR Magic a semi Macro and and a very versatile lens. Our last contender is our budget option…
using something you might already own… a focal reducer.
If you put a focal reducer on an already fast Full Frame prime… you can built your own
ultrafast lens for crop formats like super35 and Micro four thirds. And yes, you do built
a new lens with a new f-stop using a focal reducer A lens is just an optical system,
and your new optical system has the same entrance pupil but a shorter focal length… applying
the f-number formula will give the new f-stop. Usually you can apply the magnification of
the reducer to calculate your new f-stop. For Example: An f2 lens with a 0.7x focal
reducer will result in a f1.4 lens So, does that mean we could take the Canon
50mm f1 and put on a Metabones f0.64 to get to a Micro four Third lens with a ludicrous
f0.64? Unfortunately not. Focal reducers have a speed
limit for the input lens resulting in a maximum output speed. This limit is based on the flange
distance and the size of the optical element. 0.7x focal reducers top out at about f0.9…
and 0.64x focal reducers at about f0.8. That mean that an f1.2 lens is already the
fastest lens you can boost while still gaining light We are going to use a Canon FD 55mm
f1.2, because it is very fast and you can get it on ebay for around 200$. It only weights 581 grams without the booster. FD mount is slightly longer than EF mount and the 0.7x focal reducer from Kipon that we are going to use is for EF. We ordered a mount conversion
kit for the FD, but it didn’t make it in time, therefore we will have to use a diopter
adapter in-between them… that’s the blue element you see here. In conjunction, this
system with get us in the f0.9 ballpark. The Kipon reducer has a slightly higher speed limit compared to metabones specs, but Kipon assured us, that this is due to more conservative measurements, and that the general design is the same. The images don’t compare in terms of sharpness or clearness at all… which wasn’t to be expected considering the price and age of
the lens, but still, this is somewhat below our expectations. Wide open you have a lot
of highlights blooming and the image is overall soft Closing down a bit improves the sharpness, but the image is still comparably soft. It could very well be, that the diopter causes problems. Anyhow… if you are looking for an extreme vintage look, this could be for
you. I find the results interesting and I was immediately reminded of 70s British cinema something like “The Picture of Dorian Grey”. I guess, this is what you call "character" Kipon was nice enough to sponsor this episode, in form of an IBELUX f0.85 lens Thank you very much Kipon We really dig you products, we really like the medium format focal reducer We have a whole episode about it using it with Mamiya vintage glasses And, if you want to see that, check it out, I'll put the link in the corner If you are interested in this lens or the focal reducers please visit the Kipon website, I'll put a link in the description This Episode was quite an adventure for us… I personally love what we got with the Biotar and I am sure, it would have been even better on a larger format like IMAX… how cool would
it be to do it Kubrick style and modify an IMAX camera to fit it. Christopher Nolan,
If you want to play, you know where to find us... in our closed Facebook group, and you
can join us there too for a more “in depths” discussion. if you want to keep up with what
we are cooking, follow us on Instagram…. Links are in the description. As always, links to all the lenses, gear,
and music used in this episode can be found in the description. Some are affiliate links,
that means that you don’t pay more when you use them, but we get a little something for the tip jar. I hope you enjoyed this episode, please give us a like if you think we deserve one and of course, subscribe if you want to see more of it Please consider becoming a member of this channel, because, the more members we have, the more time and energy we can invest in making episodes like this So, I'm signing out, I'm Nikolas, with nerdalicious wishes... shoot something amazing what... what is that... oh dear......
