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[Lumix GH1 and Computar 25mm test] Sidewalk Notes (Prototype)

When you’re walking around on the sidewalk, you always see messages people write in the cement before it dries. When I was walking back home from school one day, I noticed that there were these messages engraved into the cement sidewalks. I knew they there, I just never really looked at them. Luckily I had my Lumix GH1 with me so I decided to record these messages on video. It was evening, so it was a little dark, but the computar lens is so great that I can take images in the dark at a faster shutter speed. But as I stated before, it was still early evening. Unfortunately I did not have a tripod with me, so the video turns out to be a little shaky.

It’s a short video, but all the messages recorded were found within a 30 yard range. What’s so important that the person just had to make their mark onto the cement and show it to the whole word? Spontaneous impulse? Pride? Love. Some were easier to decipher than others such as the greek letters, who I can only assume it was a student who expressing their pride as a member of a specific fraternity. The one at the end looks to be a heart with possibly initials on it in a similar fashion to the heart border and initials carved in the tree that we see in movies and books.

I’m thinking of going out into the city (Washington, DC) when I have time and try to record as many messages I can engraved into the sidewalk. If anyone is up to it, please try to do it within your city/town/neighborhood. See what you find. You might find something interesting.

Nothing is Right – Wayne Hsu

It is always an honor to work with Wayne Hsu. He is an amazing artist and is not only a gifted singer songwriter but also has an excellent ear as a studio engineer. The three of us won a trailer contest for the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival with Wayne scoring the music for our little 60 second animated film.

Last March, I gave a call to Wayne Hsu late one evening and said, “Hey, do you want to shoot a Music Video tonight?” Hey said, “Yeah, sure. You want to do it now?”

It was already 10pm at night and I said, “No, I’m thinking at about 1am in Chinatown in front of the arch.” It was a very chilly night but he enthusiastically agreed since it was just around the corner from where he lived. I was itching to do a few tests with some c-mount lenses a newer industrial lens, a Computar 25mm f/1.3 and an older Kodak Cine Ektar 25mm f/1.4. I wanted to compare these lenses and see how well they work with just street lights and the light of the traffic driving by at night.

The concept was simple. I had Wayne sit on top of my Subaru Forester and we parked far enough so that he would be elevated above the traffic and we could see the Chinatown Arch in the distance. One of the challenges is that in order to shoot him I needed a rig that I could hold steadily on the back bumber of the car. A tripod would not do since the bumber was about six inches wide. To make this work I used the indiSYSTEM indiRAILSpro MP which is part monopod, part camera rig, and part follow focus. It fit very nicely with me standing on the back bumper of the car.

Rather than do a MV where we were syncing to the studio recording of the song I wanted to keep the real elements alive on the streets of Chinatown and just show the beauty and simplicity of his playing. I wanted Wayne Hsu to play live acoustic. Wayne is so good playing live. And in the “LIVE” I wanted to keep the environment a part of the piece so whatever happens in the moment happens. If we have a truck barreling down the road or loud late night pedestrian traffic so be it.

The results were very beautiful. This year the Chinatown Arch dawned new lights .So from the distance as Wayne played, the Arch was brilliantly lit as a a backdrop to his playing. Both c-mount lenses really gave this piece character. The Cine Ektar 25mm was a touch sharper and had this unusual crescent shaped lens flare from the street lamp right above. The Computar 25mm lens being the faster lens was able to do very well in street lighting soft and low contrast working very well on the evening city streets. One stupid mistake I made was that I taped the lav to Wayne’s shirt and you could hear the rustle of the shirt brushing up against the mic. It’s less noticeable as the song progresses but it is very pronounced at the beginning of the song. Next time proper, lav clip or vampire clip is a must. Other than that issue, we are really happy by the way the footage turned out.

Please visit Wayne Hsu’s site. His new album will be coming out very soon:

waynehsu.com

Filming Details:

Panasonic GH1

Computar 25mm f/1.3 lens

indiSYSTEM SNAP! Gear

indiRAILSpro MP

Kodak Cine Ektar 25mm f/1.4

Sound Devices 552 Mixer/Recorder

Director: Gary San Angel

Assistant Director: Serena Perrone

Camera Operator: Rocky Kev

You Said – Wayne Hsu

This MV is the companion piece to Nothing is Right. This song is a nice little ballad and I pretty much kept it a simple two camera shoot capturing Wayne’s great singing and playing with the streets sounds all around.

When I asked Wayne to do an adhoc music video at 1am in the morning in the middle of March I didn’t think he would say yes at first but I’m really glad he did. What we attempted to do was a live street recording with two contrasting pieces. “Nothing is Right” being more upbeat would be the more polished MV. The limited b-roll I had by went to “Nothing is Right”. So “You Said” became really a documentation of a live street performance. For both of these two songs I really wanted to stay away form the polish of the studio recorded version. I just wanted to show some of the rough edges. Some of which was unfortunately a little more rough in the audio. My Sanken COS-11x which I had taped to Wayne’s shirt was not a good idea and we encountered a lot of handling noise. That’s one of the elements that I’ll learn from for the next time around.

I stuck with c-mount lenses on this shoot to experiment and see the kind of character they give to the natural street light. I’d say the Computar 25mm f/1.3 is a lens that really lends itself to the nightlife and low light street scenes. The Kodak Ektar 25mm f/1.4 also has that retro character with nice contrast and sharpness and interesting lens flares which we decided to just keep and use because it was halo-like and had a cool effect. Because most of the shots were static we only used the SNAP! Gear for b-roll and the opening shot. But it’s been really great to be able to pull focus with such small lenses using this gear. The SNAP! Gear and SNAP! Collar help in that regard giving the possibility of pulling focus on c-mount lenses. The combo of c-mount and SNAP! Gear is really so amazingly light weight it’s a blast to shoot with.

Please visit Wayne Hsu’s site. His new album will be coming out very soon:

Director: Gary San Angel

Assistant Director: Serena Perrone

Camera Operator: Rocky Kev

Filming Details:

Panasonic GH1

Computar 25mm f/1.3 lens

indiSYSTEM SNAP! Gear

indiRAILSpro MP

Panasonic GH1

Kodak Cine Ektar 25mm f/1.4

Sound Devices 552 Mixer/Recorder

Sanken COS-11x

Wherever There Is Water Parade – Fleisher Art Memorial

Artist in Residence George Ferrandi led a beautiful community based art making project and parade involving stories, sculpture, paper mache, and LED lights at the Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philadelphia. Inspired by Catholic Saint processions, “Wherever There Is Water” was a unique community parade led by Huberta one of the main characters of the story and surrounded with her are a sea of paper mache LED lanterns and animals. I got to to the event as the parade was returning back to Fleisher but I was still able to capture part of the celebratory atmosphere and community spirit of the event.

I’m still doing some more testing with c-mount lenses on the GH1 using indiSYSTEM’s SNAP! Gear and Collar this time with a Computar 25mm f/1.3 lens. This is a fairly fast lens and a very small lens. Because this was a night time shoot I thought this lens would be good to bring out of the bag. I also wanted to add something interesting to the mix on this shoot by adding a Raynox HD-5050PRO-LE .5x wide angle converter to the Computar 25mm lens which would make the focal length of the Computar 25mm lens a 12.5mm lens with the addition of the .5x Raynox converter. Now in order to know what focal length that would be equivalent to on a Full Frame camera we would multiply 12.5mm by 2x and we would have an equivalent field of view of a 25mm lens.

A few folks have been exploring wide angle converters simply because one of the challenges with this format is finding a good fast wide angle lens. I looked around and saw the Raynox wide angle converter which interested me because of its low image distortion as well as being very small and light weight. And with the rear thread size of the Raynox being only 37mm, I could easily attach it to the front of many of my c-mount lenses including my fast Computar 25mm f/1.3 lens. Using a 40.5mm to 37mm step down ring, I was able to attach the HD-5050PRO-LE to the front of my Computar 25mm lens with the combined weight of the lens and adapter being less than my Canon FD 50mm lens.

The Computar 25mm f/1.3 is an industrial lens that is rather fast and is one of the few c-mount 25mm lenses that I’ve tested that almost fills the image sensor of the GH1. Many m4/3 still photography users have picked up this lens and have had really good results but I wanted to use it in a film context and see how well it does in an evening shoot and I thought the “Wherever There is Water” Parade would be perfect to test and see how all these combination works together.

I was really astonished by how well the Raynox wide angle converter worked with the Computar 25mm c-mount lens. There was really minimal distortion and light lose and compared to other wide angle adapters that I have tried before including a Century wide angle adapter, the 5050PRO-LE can really trick your eye to think that you are shooting without a converter. Upon close inspection, I can see the light fall off and softer focus around the edges but it is much less pronounced than what I’ve used with other wide angle adapters and this is really quite exciting to see. I’d like to shoot with this same setup in the day just to see how well the Raynox adapter works with the Computar lens. One down side is that the wide angle lens does flare a lot and you can see that in the test footage where the street lamp light shines into the lens. It’s a cool effect but it is something to be aware about.

The indiSYSTEM SNAP! Gear and Collar worked quite nicely allowing me to pull focus much better than with my Ektar II 25mm lens that I had tested previously. There’s a shorter distance that you have to go from close focus to infinity and that gives you greater control. I am continually blown away by the ability to pull focus with small c-mounts lenses. There’s a freedom in a way that I find so much fun. Just a few years ago, I was shooting with my back breaking my HVX or EX1 rig with 35mm adapter. And this is night and day to be able to scale down your setup and achieve similar results.

Overall, this was a fun unexpected test to see some real nice results with this combination of fast prime c-mount lens, wide angle adapter, and follow focus system in an all in one run and gun setup.

Many thanks to George Ferrandi, Fleisher Art Memorial and the Philly community for sharing their beautiful creations. Hope this captures just a small taste of this wonderful community celebration.

Featuring music by PINK MARTINI – Ou Est Ma Tete? from their new album Splendor in the Grass. (My favorite band!)

For more information on the “Wherever There is Water” Parade please visit:

fleisher.org/exhibitions/water.php

If you liked the music please buy Pink Martini’s new album:

pinkmartini.com/

This was shot with the Panasonic GH1 1080/24P and a Computar 25mm f/1.3 c-mount lens with Raynox HD 5050PRO-LE Wide Angle Adapter.

The indiSYSTEM SNAP! Gear and Collar was also used to test pulling focus with this smaller c-mount lens.

[Lumix GH1 and Computar 25mm test] My Personal Christmas Tradition

Yes, I know. I'm a month late with the whole Christmas holidays with this, but it's finally here. I decided to focus on something simple, but very important to me. Every year for the holidays, my family and I go to a close family friend's house to celebrate the holidays. My father always makes seafood rice soup for everyone to eat. He has done this pretty much ever year for possibly over 20 years I think sometime after his arrive in the United States. My dad is awesome, his soup is delicious and it is personally important to me, so I thought this was something that was worth recording.

While I've used other cameras before, this was my first time (first time as in during Christmas Day 2010) using the Panasonic Lumix GH1 with a 25mm computar lens. While I'm familiar with using DSLR cameras prior, I do not use it often. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by the size of the camera; it is very light, but packs quite a punch.

I was often on-the-go when I was shooting my father while he was cooking (with some assistance from my close family friend/grandmother; some of the footage is shakier than I thought. The lens I used is not made for movement, so you can see I was often adjusting the focus of the lens. Other times, I accidentally changed the f-stop rather than the focus (seen at the end). If the lighting was good, the image appeared to be quite sharp. But as I said, I was quickly trying to follow my father's moment and encountered different lighting situations: the sink near the window, the light under the stove and the dining room where it was fairly dark. I wasn't even thinking of changing the f-stop as I moved from one place to another at times as you can see with the footage of my uncle in the video. In turn, the image wasn't as crisp as I would like it to be.

Nonetheless, this is my first real attempt as using the camera. Hopefully things will get better as I learn more about it and have a better grasp on it.

MUSIC
"We WIsh You a Merry Christmas" & "Jingle Bells" by Kevin MacLeod
from incompetech.com, used under the Creative Commons license.

FILMED WITH
Panasonic GH1
Computar 25mm

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