Dom Jaeger

Actually they're too young to watch some scary sci-fi show, I was using creative licence about the couch reservation. When we do watch something together, it's Peppa Pig and they sit about 3 feet away, so the couch is pretty much mine.

A quick look at the completed listings for B&H 70DRs doesn't show that, most are going for around $100 for a body with one lens: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_from=R40&_nkw=Bell+Howell+70DR&LH_PrefLoc=2&LH_Complete=1&LH_Sold=1&rt=nc The only time they sell for more than a few hundred is when there are sought-after lenses involved, like Angenieux primes or particular Cookes (or others). Certain C-mount lenses have been fetching crazy prices for a while now. The cheapest option is often to buy a whole camera with lenses attached. As far as quality goes, Filmos are probably more durable and "professionally made" than Bolexes, but being non-reflex and rather basic they're not as well-regarded or popular. The original design from the 20s was really only superficially altered in subsequent models over the following decades, and comes from a time when Bell & Howell were also making professional 35mm studio cameras. By contrast, Paillard Bolex were amateur (perhaps becoming semi-pro) camera makers - albeit of the highest quality in that domain - but they consistently modernized their cameras with newer features. Late model Bolexes will generally fetch more than earlier non-reflex ones, but again these days it's the lenses that add real value.

Extant premieres on Australian free-to-air TV this sunday. I've cancelled all appointments and reserved best spot on the couch!

You could call local rental houses and ask if you might be allowed to spend some time in their prep area watching camera kits get assembled and checked. It's in the rental house's interest that new assistants get to know and respect the gear, so as long as they're not too busy and you're not too demanding it shouldn't be a problem.

Giant robots! No wait, shape-shifting aliens! Hire the Hemsworth boys and Jennifer Lawrence, with narration by Morgan Freeman! Do it as a musical, with lyrics by Kanye West! Or get Peter Jackson onboard and have the whole thing acted out by hobbits! Spend 4 years doing an amazing, emotionally powerful stop-motion version with Adam Elliot, break people's hearts and win an Oscar! Or do it like Thunderbirds, with really dodgy puppets! Whatever you choose, make sure the accidents are gruesomely recreated and shot in "bullet time".. :) Good luck, sounds like a fun project!

In Europe try someone like Gecko-Cam or Pure4C in Munich. The cost will depend a bit on whether it needs a replacement part, but given the plummeting value of film gear these days who knows if a whole new eyepiece might not be cheaper. You could try opening it up yourself if you're careful, it may be an easy fix, like just a loose screw.

Some might say that a Red One camera is more obsolete these days than an old Angenieux zoom. ;) The question of lens choice is pretty vast, any recommendations will depend primarily on your budget. If you've got 50 to 100K to spend you can't beat Angenieux Optimos, although there are also nice PL zooms by Fujinon in that price range. For 20 to 30K there are Angenieux's DP range, Fujinon's Aluras, Zeiss Compact zooms or the new Canon zooms all in PL. Under 10K and you 're starting to look at rehoused stills zooms, cine-mods or second hand stuff, RED zooms or older glass like what you already own. The lowest budget option is stills lenses, wholly unsuited to video work, but often used anyway these days. That option requires a matching camera mount.

Sorry, I don't know anyone outside Australia that might service Eyemos, and I've never seen a Steve's Cine modification.

You must have a nice stash of old cine literature Charlie! Thanks for putting that up. Sopelem were a French company created in the 60s by the merger of Som Berthiot and another optical company called OPL. Rank Taylor Hobson were only the international distributers. According to Charlie's literature, the 23-115 was "a lower price zoom offered for less exacting applications than the M series". It was designed for CCTV Vidicon tube cameras of the day which had far less resolution than 16mm film, so it could be manufactured to lower specifications than the lenses made for film cameras. The one advantage for today's market is that it would have been designed to have an image circle diameter of at least 16mm, for use with 1" Vidicon tubes, which was larger than the image circle required for 16mm cameras. So these days you could advertise it as "covering Super 16", which is what people need in order to use an old lens with some of the new Super 16 size sensor cameras that are available. Like Jean-Louis surmised, it was probably based on a 20-100 design, with a 1.15x extender added to increase the image circle.

As the 3 wheel car idea illustrates, 3 points are fine until you add motion! My personal favourite odd- ball car used only 2 wheels combined with gyroscopic stabilisation: http://www.aqpl43.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/gyrocars/schilovs.htm Awesome! But probably not much help with this question..

Toothbrushes are great for cleaning focus threads, gear teeth, little channels and such. I like your idea of using bath plugs as gripping tools, very creative! There's probably a whole tool set you could fabricate from things you find in the bathroom.. :)

Hi Levi, the accessory socket is an 11 pin Fischer. Pin 11 is +12V Pin 9 is ground

Hi Bill, pulling apart lenses is one of the best parts of my job, a bit like solving puzzles, especially when you don't have drawings or disassembly instructions. There's great satisfaction when you finally work out the trick that unlocks the next layer. Sometimes you need to start from the front, sometimes the back, sometimes both! Sometimes a lock ring doesn't have notches for a lens wrench to slot into, and you need to use circular rubber grips. I've made about 20 of those, of different sizes, using O-ring rubber cut and glued to the end of tubes. But certainly the main tools are jeweller's screwdrivers (or occasionally mini allen keys) and a lens wrench. You can buy lens wrenches on ebay for next to nothing these days. If the lens is junk I guess scissors would work too, but be careful not to cut yourself, sometimes undoing a lock ring can take a bit of force. To safely remove glass elements you need suction cups, but that's probably beyond what you're interested in. Some other tools I personally find very useful are tweezers, magnifying loupes, toothbrushes, cotton buds and most importantly a compartment tray to keep all the bits in. You can store the bits in sequence to make it easier to reassemble later. A drop of acetone on tiny screw heads will soften any locking varnish, as Stuart mentioned. Lock rings and other threaded connections may also be varnished in, again a drop of acetone run into the join will help loosen things. Just be careful of some plastics or painted surfaces when using acetone. Some stills lenses have screws hidden under a decal glued on over the front ring. Be careful not to damage the heads of tiny screws, once the slot or cross or hex is rounded off the only recourse is to drill the screw out. If a screw won't turn it's best to try some more acetone or even a bit of heat from a hair dryer rather than force it. Though I suppose it doesn't really matter if you're just playing with junk lenses. Here's a photo I took recently of a Kowa anamorphic lens I spent some time overhauling, it has very clever dual focus mechanics where the focus ring moves both a middle anamorphic element via a cam and the rear prime via a helical thread at the same time:

Hey Sergey! Actually it's winter here now, so no hot sun. I service a lot of Lomo lenses, which is why I was interested in your spare elements. But some of the comments in the thread I linked to, plus this thread on RedUser: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?82658-Sergey-Kravchenko-lomo-update made me think twice about dealing with you. I was actually hoping you might explain why so many people seem unhappy with your customer service, since I would be interested in what you're selling if these rumours were cleared up. I'm quite aware that customers can sometimes be vexatious despite everything you do for them. If you feel you are being wrongfully accused, you have the opportunity here to explain your side of the story and what might have caused all these complaints. By simply getting angry and threatening me with legal action you don't exactly make it easier to trust you. But feel free to take me to the International Court of Justice if you like! Dom Jaeger

For freelance work $265 for a 10 hour day is cheap. He doesn't claim to be a "cinematographer" as far as I can see, more of a filmmaking jack-of-all-trades and even mentions being open to negotiated rates for low budget jobs. His reel seems OK for someone just starting out. As others have pointed out, you'd be paying a lot more for a commercial DP. If you don't like his reel Matthew, don't hire him. It's pretty simple. There's no need to put someone up on display just so you can whine about what you perceive to be expensive, especially if you haven't even talked to them to negotiate rates. He actually sounds quite reasonable, whereas to be honest you're coming across as entitled and petty.

If you can't find an adapter that works with auto only M42 lenses you'll have to do some modification, this site has some suggestions: http://www.instructables.com/id/M42-Lens-Aperture-Control-on-Modern-DSLRs/step3/Automatic-Only-Lenses/

Well, you can moan about your tiny budget and sit on your hands assuming no-one cares about the small stuff like Phil (although he does it with remarkable panache :) ), but like Gregory said, there's nothing to lose by asking around. There are longer term discounts beyond day rates, and package deals. Some equipment that may not be "so hot right now" and sitting on shelves might get a better discount. A few years back the rental house I work for did a deal exchanging camera rental for some website work because the film maker was also an IT expert. Some places might be willing to undercut another quote just to get the work if things are quiet, or if they're trying to build relationships etc etc.

I know of a few younger ACs who only use Prestons or the like, and wouldn't know a manual follow focus if you bonked them on the head with one. We recently had to emergency freight a Preston unit to a location because the focus puller refused to work without one!

I don't have any technical information on that motor, but you could safely assume that the body alone would probably draw around 1A, with a fully loaded mag you'd be up closer to 2A. An unserviced camera that's stiff to manually turn over will draw more, as will running the camera at higher speeds. Also, the start-up current can spike at several times the normal running current, so you need a power supply that can supply at least 6A. It doesn't matter if your power supply can supply 10 or 20A, the camera will just draw what it needs.

Before dealing with this person it would be worth looking at this thread: http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=62386&do=findComment&comment=408412 A number of people have not received goods they paid for, and Sergey doesn't seem interested in answering their complaints.

The Cooke 20-100 has a rectangular front matte that cuts into the sides at the very wide end of the range, but if you remove it (which is quite simple) the lens covers S35 1.78 no problem. I threw both zooms on a 35mm film camera to have a look, the Angenieux actually looks pretty good covering a 1.78 ground glass, maybe just a very slight darkening in the corners between 25 and 30mm, where the image circle is smallest.

Towards the wide end the image circle goes down to a bit over 28 mm diameter, which is enough to cover 1.78 on an Alexa, or a 1.85 or 2.35 extraction from Super 35 but it will slightly vignette on Super 35 1.78 at the wide end.

There are plenty of reasons to rent lenses: to get the right focal length range and look for a project without making a huge investment to be able to compare and test lenses in order to make that decision to choose a lens size or weight that best suits the project to make sure the lenses will all be properly collimated and in good condition to access lenses immediately, without needing to spend time finding, purchasing, testing and possibly having to get them serviced to have a back up if a lens is dropped or damaged to try out different lenses to access lenses that may be rare or otherwise hard to find to use lenses that match a particular camera mount or format to use specialty lenses like probes or macros or extreme telephotos or shift and tilts etc for specific shots to access the knowledge bank and technical resources of rental house staff to ensure that a production isn't dependent on a particular crew member for a vital part of the gear list to ensure that questions of liability in case of damage and associated insurance are well understood etc Some of these reasons may be more obvious to working professionals than someone trying to make their first feature on a very low budget. Clearly there is no single lens set that suits every project, and on many productions the cost of time lost due to faulty or inappropriate gear or desperately sourcing replacements is not a risk worth taking. I'm not sure who you mean by the "pros" who you believe should invest in lenses - DPs, camera assistants, directors? - but calling them cheap because they won't cover costs that are rightfully production costs is ludicrous. The better restaurant analogy is if you were running a restaurant and expected the waiters to bring all the cutlery and crockery and the chefs to bring all their own pots, pans and ovens. (Edit: as Stuart just said.)

The Letus adapter is designed to clamp on as well as have the option to be supported by rods. The basic clamp diameter is 114mm which would fit Zeiss CP2s and their lightweight zoom, Canon's Cinema primes, as well as most Master Primes and many Angenieux Optimos, and can easily be spaced down to 110 mm or other common front diameters. I wouldn't recommend clamping for telescoping lenses like Super Speeds or many stills zoom lenses as it places too much pressure on the mechanics, and obviously it's not appropriate for lenses where the front also rotates as they focus. In those cases you'd need to use rods - ideally using a support that can slide and connecting with rotatable filter thread adapters, otherwise leaving a space to accommodate focus travel. The problem then is to cover the gap to prevent light entering, and also the focal range of the taking lens will be reduced, as a gap will introduce vignetting on wider lenses. One of the big advantages to the Letus AnamorphX is the range of focal lengths it covers, down to 15 mm for Super35 formats, which is way wider than any of the vintage adapters can cover. The focussing system uses 3 distance settings, which seems simple enough, and let's you get pretty close without needing diopters. Not as simple as proper anamorphic lenses, but probably the best low budget option around. Certainly much better than the Panasonic AG-7200 adapter, and the matte box and new filter holder seem well designed. It's only a 1.33 squeeze, so the anamorphic artifacts are much subtler than traditional 2x anamorphics. But you can choose different coating options for more or less flare. At NAB 2014 Letus announced a yet to be released Pro version of the adapter for $1000 or so more, promising better correction and around twice the resolution, as well as a 1.8x squeeze version for 4:3 sensors.

3C was the last evolution of the 2C before the 35-3, not many made. I'd second giving Arri CSC a call, they may also recommend someone on the west coast. These are pretty simple cameras mechanically, an overhaul shouldn't cost the earth.