Between May 19th, and Saturday May 24th, Part 2

My new toy arrived today. I’m not quite ready, and unable to afford to go to HD as of yet. Yes, the price of HD cameras are pretty low right now, but you still have to buy the extra drives to put the bigger footage on, and you’d have to buy a firestore or whatever they’re called to be able to drop the footage from the P2 cards to something else while on location. Yes, right now, I would get a Panasonic HVX over anything else. It’s a good thing I decided not to go HD right now either, as Panasonic has just released the HVX200a, which seems to have some significant improvements over the previous model.

If there’s one tech thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that you’ll always be updating your camera. There’s quite a bit of equipment I’d like to have, and this equipment should be around forever, unlike the cameras that you update every few years. If we absolutely need an HD camera, we can always rent one.

So I figure to get the best bang for the buck, I’ve decided to get a 35mm adapter, which will allow us to use 35mm lenses on the camera, giving us better depth of field shots. Once we’re ready to go to HD we’ll also be able to use this adapter with that. Out of everything I could’ve got, I figure this will give us the best production value enhancement.

I first became interested in adapters a few years ago after Bob bought a Redrock. I did a lot of research on them, and came up with one or two that I would get, but couldn’t justify the price back then. I watched a little snippet on indymogul.com where they talked about 35mm adapters and became interested in them again. After a bunch of research I decided to go with the Brevis because it loses the least amount of light, it’s Canadian, and you can take the whole thing apart and add things to it later on. It’s totally upgradable. If you don’t like the ground glass, you can put another one in. If there’s dust inside, you can take it apart and clean it as opposed to sending it back. To me, it’s the most versatile one out there, and the pros outweigh the cons.

I got the Pentax mount after deciding that all my friends have Nikon lenses that are digital, and I can’t really use. I have an old Vivitar camera and it takes me a night of research to find out that the lenses I have for the Vivitar are Pentax K-Mount. You see, Vivitar made a bunch of 3rd party lenses for various camera manufacturers. This whole process would’ve been easier had Vivitar just made their own camera and lenses like Pentax or Nikon.

Cool. I have a 30 to 70mm lens and a 70 -200mm lens as well. I just want a 50mm prime lens and figure I can pick one up in a pawn shop in the area.

This is definitely a new beast, and it will be a challenge to use, but I’m excited about its possibilities. Bill and I will definitely have to do some tests with it as he’s my camera operator, and it’s going to take some getting used to.