On Paying What You Get For

Yea, so I got a fish-eye lens earlier – an el-cheapo that cost about $150. Is that el-cheapo? Apparently. Proper ones cost thousands.

So far I’ve been buying little Takumar lenses from the 70s – and they’re pretty good… they do have a certain “look” I think. A 70s look, but that’s cool. They’re still pretty sharp – and the action on them is incredibly smooth – far far better than the lenses that Canon supply with the kit – they are pretty sharp as well though – just not well-suited to dark conditions, and I only exist in dark conditions – or crepuscular, which is a terrible word for a great concept.

So this fish-eye is the first one I’ve had that is noticeably a bit crap I think. Maybe that’s what happens with fisheye lenses. I’m not too bothered to be honest – my video-style is chaotic enough for it not to be a huge deal… but eventually I’ll need to get a kilo-bucks version.

This is fish-eye (an edited segment)

This is the canon kit lens

Not well treated, or framed photos… but the fisheye one is considerably less well-focused. Maybe this is because it’s got more to do. Dunno – but I’m not that interested in ultra-hi-fidelity anyway. Because, because, because… I have this instinct not-to-do what other people are doing. This for example which I can’t embed because it’s on Kickstarter – who have used jwplayer – they’re hosting the videos themselves… TO. BE. IN. CON.TROL. I guess.

There’s something about it that just annoys the hell out of me. I don’t know if it’s the infantilising trailer-speak or the crashing middle-classness of it all (hey, don’t worry, I don’t have any particular affiliation with the working or ruling classes either. I hate everybody equally)… but something it has got is DSLR-like clarity – either massive depth of field or that boutique effect that everyone seems to love so much. Cool. I wish you well, you’ve done a great job – but you’re the opposite of what I want to be.

This is what movies should look like

Everything else is bogus and manipulative.

My Brother the-one-who-knows-what-he’s-talking-about says he pretty much only uses fish-eye now. His rational is that it’s good to have angles so wide that people don’t know they’re being photoed, or so long that people don’t know they’re being photoed – because when they’re conscious of it, they kindof put on an act and it all goes a bit stilted and unnatural. I can kindof see his point – but I don’t think I want curvy lines in every shot.

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That aside, I’ve been experimenting with using FLV to upload to youtube – because the current rate seems to be about a megabyte a minute – which is arsequakingly slow. If you’ve got a 500Mb file (and who hasn’t) then it takes a fucking eternity to upload, during which time it will probably crash on you or something. So I’ve been using FLV to compress things down to about 50Mb – which is another reason this clip looks so dodgy… but mainly it’s the iffy lens, and the high iso.

(shadows of the evening, crawl across the years)