Tag Archives: prime

Sirui Night Walker APS-C/Super35 mm t1.2 Lens review.

July 11, 2023 alisterchapman 2 Comments

Shortly before my annual trip to film the Theatre and Circus fields of the Glastonbury festival I was offered the use of a set of pre-production Sirui Night Walker lenses. Currently one of my favourite cameras to shoot with is my FX30, so the opportunity to use a set of fast, mini prime lenses, purpose made for APS-C/Super 35 was an offer to good to refuse.

Sirui Night Walker 55mm t1.2 lens on my FX30

The Night Walkers are small lenses, only 84mm long. But the have a very nice weight and feel to them. They are constructed out of aluminium and feel solid and robust. They have good quality gear rings for a remote follow focus and a pretty decent 270 degree focus throw (although the scale does get a little cramped from 9m to infinity). The drag of the focus ring and iris rings gives a nice feel and for me seems just right. Holding them in your hand they certainly feel like a quality lens. They all have the same front diameter and all take a 67mm filter.

Currently there are 3 focal lengths, a 24mm, 35mm and a 55mm. It would be nice to have a wider lens in the set at some point but this is a pretty good place to start.

I didn’t do any scientific testing, instead I just dived straight in to the shoot. I started by shooting some of the preparations that go on inside the circus big top. We were supplying footage for the BBC to use in a special feature about the circus at Glastonbury and they were very keen to get some behind the scenes footage. During the build it is often very dark inside the big top tent as there is very little external light. So, having very fast lenses was a big help.

I have to admit that I have been shooting a lot with autofocus recently and it took me a little while to get back into the swing of shooting gun with a manual lens. But it really was worth the extra effort and there is something nice about that very positive connection you get between yourself and the camera when a good quality manual focus cine lens that you just don’t get with most lenses designed primarily for autofocus.

These really are mini cine lenses, designed for video, designed for manual focus.

So, the BIG question – how do they look?

Well, the images they produce looks really nice. At t1.2 they are a touch soft, but not in a nasty way, I think this slight softness actually helps to take the edge off the extreme sharpness of a 4K camera like the FX30. As you stop them down a bit they do get sharper and from around t3.5 they are very sharp. But overall on my FX30 I liked they way they looked wide open. It’s very cliché but I guess I would describe it as a vintage look. I did a lot of pull focusses with them and the breathing is extremely well controlled and barely noticeable across all 3 lenses in the set.

Flare is also well controlled, although if you really push them shooting directly into the sun or another extremely bright light shadows may become very slightly elevated, but certainly not anything to worry about. Chromatic aberrations are also well minimised. As you would expect there is a bit more when wide open, but stop down a bit and there is barely any CA.

The bokeh from these lenses is very pleasing. I didn’t notice anything nasty or unpleasant in the out of focus areas, something that often spoils many other budget lenses. The bokeh is smooth and uniform.

Take a look at this video shot entirely with the Night Walkers to get an idea of how they look.

I have to say that shooting with these lenses was a delight. A few years ago I shot in the big top with a Venice and Cooke Anamorphics. Since then I have wanted to get a similar look but without the bulk (or cost). The Night Walkers went a long way towards getting that look.

The best bit about these lenses however is the price. At the moment Sirui are offering a very special price of only $309.00 per lens via their Indigogo campaign. After that they will be $349.00. Even at that higher price these lenses are an absolute bargain if you have a camera with an APS-C sensor camera such as the FX30 or a camera with a super 35mm scan mode.

lenses, Review

Sigma FF High Speed Primes.

May 17, 2018 alisterchapman 6 Comments

The main lenses I used for my recent Sony Venice shoot in Arizona were the Sigma Full Frame High Speed primes in PL mount.

These are really really nice lenses!

As they cover a full frame sensor such as the one in Sony’s Venice high end digital cinematography camera these are pretty future proof lenses. They are all fast lenses with most of them opening up to T1.5. At T1.5 you have a 20, 24, 35, 50 and 85mm lenses and at T2.0 you can go as wide as 14mm and as long as 135mm.

They are of all metal construction, the build quality is absolutely first class. As soon as you pick one up it just exudes quality. They are not light weight lenses, coming in at between 1kg and 1.3kg in PL mount form, but that weight gives you the confidence that these are lenses that will last. Lenses that will stand up to daily professional use on a film or documentary shoot. They are dust and moisture sealed, which is probably just as well as on this shoot there was a lot of blowing sand and dust. Our on set photographer was having problems with sand and grit in his lenses by the end of the shoot, but the Sigmas just shrugged it off.

The focus and aperture markings are very clear and easy to read they even glow in the dark! The focus ring rotates through a full 180 degrees and both the focus and aperture rings have standard 0.8 pitch teeth for follow focus controls etc. The gear rings are all the same distance from the mount so there is no need to move the follow focus when changing lenses.

The lenses are available with PL, E mount or EF mounts. The set I had were fitted with PL. The mounts are not user interchangeable, but you can have the mount swapped by Sigma if you do find that you need to change it for some reason.

I shot several scenes with the 20mm lens using the Venice’s full frame 6K x 4K mode. Examining these images in post production reveals that the 20mm is really sharp right out into the corners. I also shot with the lenses wide open in some pretty dark places and even wide open they stay tack sharp. Take a look at the image below, it’s really sharp. If you click on the image you can enlarge it to view it at close to the original 6K resolution.

Frame grab from Venice. Horseshoe bend, Page Arizona. Sigma 20mm FF prime. Click on the image to enlarge.

Shooting night scenes with the 135mm wide open also gave beautiful results. When shooting with a shallow DoF all the lenses have a very pleasing bokeh. This is perhaps in part thanks to the use in all of the lenses of a 9 blade, rounded diaphragm aperture system.

When changing focus mid shot breathing is minimal and the focus ring is silky smooth. A really nice touch is the use of a damper at the focus stops so there is no noise if you hit the end stops.

Frame Grab from Venice, 2500 ISO, Sigma 24mm. Click on the image to expand.

During the shoot I used the 20,24,35,50,85 and 135mm lenses and they all performed really well. Looking at the footage in the grading suite it looks sharp and there are no nasty distortions. I did notice a touch of barrel distortion with the 24mm but this is to be expected with a wide lens on a full frame sensor. All the lenses matched really well, the colour remaining constant throughout the whole range. The look from the lenses was very neutral. Lens flare was extremely well controlled and I didn’t notice my blacks becoming washed out in high contrast situations. When shooting into the sun or at a direct light source any flare that I did see was normally quite pleasing.

The shot below was obtained shooting towards the sun when it was very low in the sky, yet the lens behaved flawlessly retaining deep blacks and a very high contrast image.

Frame grab from Venice with Sigma 135mm FF lens shooting into the sun in a very high contrast scenario. Click on the image to enlarge.

These lenses helped me capture some truly beautiful images with the Venice camera. I’ve long been a fan of Sigmas more recent lens designs. I have several of the Sigma Art Lenses and these have always performed exceptionally well. These prime lenses take things one step further putting world class optics into housings designed for manual control and the rigours of professional film and video productions. They are very competitively priced, especially when you consider that these are full frame lenses. I really hope to be able to use them again on future shoots. They really are top notch lenses and the images I captured with them look gorgeous.

cinematography

How big a compromise is using a DSLR zoom on a 4K camera?

May 15, 2013 alisterchapman 4 Comments

This came up as a question in response to the post about my prototype lens adapter. The adapter is based around an electronic Canon EF mount and the question was, what do I think about DSLR zooms?

There is a lot of variation between lenses when it comes to sharpness, contrast and distortions. A zoom will always be a compromise compared to a prime lens. DSLR lenses are designed to work with 24MP sensors. A 4K camera only has around 9MP, so your working well within the design limits of the lens even at 4K. While a dedicated PL mount zoom like an Angenieux Optimo will most likely out perform a similar DSLR zoom. The difference at like for like apertures will not be huge when using smaller zoom ratios (say 4x). But 10x and 14x zooms make more compromises in image quality, perhaps a bit of corner softness or more CA and these imperfections will be better or worse at different focal lengths and apertures. At the end of the day zooms are compromises but for many shoots it may simply be that it is only by accepting some small compromises that you will get the shots you want. Take my storm chasing shoots. I could use primes and get better image quality, but when you only have 90 seconds to get a shot there simply isn’t time to swap lenses, so if you end up with a wide on the camera when a long lens is what is really needed, your just not going to get the shot. Using a zoom means I will get the shot. It might not be the very best quality possible but it will look good. It is going to be better than I could get with an HD camera and a very slightly compromised shot is better than no shot at all.
If the budget would allow I would have a couple of cameras with different prime lenses ready to go. Or I would use a big, heavy and expensive PL zoom and have an assistant or team tasked solely with getting the tripod set up and ready asap. But my budget isn’t that big. I could spend weeks out storm chasing before I get a decent shot, so anything I can do to minimise costs is important.
It’s all about checks and balances. It is a compromise, but a necessary one. It’s not a huge compromise as I suspect the end viewer is not going to look at the shot and say “why is that so soft” unless they have a side by side, like for like shot to compare. DSLR zooms are not that bad! So yes, using a DSLR zoom is not going to deliver quality to match that of a similar dedicated PL zoom in most cases, but the difference is likely to be so small that the end viewer will never notice and thats a compromise I’m prepared to accept in order to get a portable camera that shoots 4K with a 14x zoom lens.

What about DSLR primes and why have I chosen the Canon Mount?

This is where the image performance gap gets even narrower. A high quality DSLR prime can perform just as well as many much more expensive PL mount lenses. The difference here is more about the usability of the lens. Some DSLR lenses can be tiny and this makes them fiddly to use. They are all All sorts of sizes, so swapping lenses may mean swapping Matte boxes or follow focus positions etc. Talking of focus, very often the focus travel on a DSLR lens is very, very short so focussing is fiddly. If the lens has an aperture ring it will probably have click stops making smooth aperture changes mid shot difficult. My prime lenses are de-clicked or never had clicks in the first place (like the Samyang Cine Primes). It’s not so much the issue of requiring a finer step than the one stop click, but more the ability to pull aperture during the shot. It’s not something I need to do often, but if I suddenly find I need to do it, I want a smooth aperture change. That being said, one of the issues with using Canon EF lenses with their electronic iris is that they operate in 1/8th stop steps and this is visible in any footage. Ultimately I am still committed to using the Canon mount lenses simply because there are so many to choose from and they focus in the right direction unlike Nikon lenses which focus back to front. For primes I’m using the excellent and fully manual Samyang T1.5 Cine Primes. I really like these lenses and they produce beautiful images at a fraction of the price of a PL mount lens. My zoom selection is a bit of a mish-mash. One thing about having a Canon mount on the camera is that I can still use Nikon lenses if I fit the lens with a low cost Nikon to Canon adapter ring. If you do this you can only use lenses with an actual iris ring, so generally these are slightly older lenses, but for example I have a nice Sigma 24-70mm f2.8 with a manual iris ring (and it focusses the RIGHT way, like most Sigmas but unlike most Nikon mount lenses). In addition I have a 70-300mm f4 Nikon mount Sigma as well as an Old Tokina 28-70mm f2.6 (lovely lens, a little soft but very nice warm colour). One thing I have found is that most of the Nikon to Canon adapter rings are little bit on the thin side. This prevents any zooms from being Parfocal as it puts the back focus out. Most of the adpaters are made in two parts and it’s quite easy to take the front and back parts apart and add shims made out of of thin plastic sheet or even card between the two halves to correct the back focus distance.

So there you have it. Overall DSLR lenses are not a huge compromise. Of course I would love to own a flight case full of good quality PL mount, 4K ready, glass. Perhaps one day I will, but it’s a serious investment. Currently I use DSLR lenses for my own projects and then hire in better glass where the budget will allow. For any commercials or features this normally means renting in a set of Ultra Primes or similar. I am keeping a close eye on the developments from Zunow. I like their 16-28mm f2.8 and the prototype PL primes I saw at NAB look very good. I also like the look of the Zeiss 15.5 to 45 light weight zoom. Then of course there is the excellent Fujinon 19-90mm Cabrio servo zoom, but these are all big bucks. Hopefully I’ll get some nice big projects to work on this year that will allow me to invest in some top end lenses.