The Lumix 35mm arrived from backorder yesterday, but a busy day and lots of work lately made me a little apathetic to its arrival.
Old mate the spider web again. Bokeh in this example is decent and colour quite different to the cine lens.
Images like this remind me I am in full frame land, where f1.8 on a semi wide is shallow even over distance.
Decently sharp wide open in the centre.
Some obvious CA wide open in this torture test, but looks easy to remove.
Minimum focus is actually pretty good. This stump is bout 3” or 8cm across. Unlike the cine lenses, the Bokeh is busier, colour richer.
I shot this centred, then left and right, but hand held and only moments after mounting it on a camera for the first time.
Bokeh is a little messy, but a messy subject.
I thought I had an issue with the left side of the lens, until I realised I was at a different distance and angle.
Right side was more square on, so a more settled image.
Uses for this lens for my full frame kit are;
Wide angle video lens. For videography I have several very wide angle video lenses*, but for more cinematic work, this is as wide as I will likely want to go, so I have both a modern AF lens and cinema lens in this space.
Environmental, semi-wide portrait lens. This is the most depth of field sensitive wide angle I have. I used the S5 kit for a portrait shoot the same day the 35 later arrived and found it overkill for my needs**.
Walk around lens. My standard for most work, especially if matched to an 85mm. I struggle with the idea of full frame for this type of application, being so comfortable with M43, but it is there and the S primes are very light, even if they are huge compared to M43 equivalents.
A low light wide for stills. If I need the ultimate low light handler for stage coverage etc, this is the one, or the 35 f2 cine lens of course.
This completes my full frame offering, mostly reserved for video and portraiture or low light support for my M43 kit. It covers 20 to 150mm (225mm in Super 35 video) with the IRIX macro at one end and the decent kit zoom covering the other to a professional standard.
I almost jumped at a Sigma 24 f3.5 DN special offer, but remembered I actually have a lens (the kit zoom), that covers that focal length at the same speed and well enough for my needs, so I think I am done now. There is a 7Artisans 14mm coming (14/21mm in video), but for cinematic work I would rather an anamorphic, probably on my M43 camera.
It is handy I guess to have similar focal lengths with different perspectives and Bokeh rendering with the same logic as anamorphic compared to spherical lenses***.
I poured a decent investment into my full frame kit, something I will have to justify as time travels on, the bulk in S-Primes and the IRIX, the other cine lenses were just a bargain I could not refuse.
As I said in my previous “winding back the clock” retrospective, I could as easily have skipped this (bought a GH5II or GH6), but nothing is ever wasted and if I get one of those clients who knows enough to insist on a full frame, but not enough to know why, the S5 and G9II are effectively interchangeable to look at, so who would know?
;)
*The 20mm end of the kit zoom and a clutch of M43 offerings.
** I used the Lumix 50, 85 and 150 lenses mostly at f2.8 and 3.4 for safety and to render the right amount of blurring and realised that f1.8 on my M43 lenses would have been the same. As for quality, there was plenty, but there is with M43 also (my G9II actually offering slightly more).
Any less depth of field would obscure the portraits relevance with the deliberately placed painting for an artistically inclined subject, the image for an art competition catalogue. This was the 85mm at f3.2, my 45mm at f1.8 would have been much the same (with possibly smoother Bokeh!). Something I realised later was the 45mm at 1.8 would likely have better highlight shape than the 85 at f3.2, where the iris is slightly closed down. Need to test that.
***I could actually use a 50mm as a 50mm, a M43 25mm as a 50mm and an anamorphic 24mm as a 50/35mm for visual variety.