Matthew B Clark

No haven't spoken to him. The guy who posted this photo did so back in 2006 (and now his name is crossed out...so no longer a member I guess?). It's also nearly a decade old so I wanted to re-boot the whol idea in case anyone is aware of cheap-o security cams like this I can just kind of "stick to the viewfinder" somehow. Even more likely that little LCD displays are cheaper and slimmer in 2014. Could be a good time to make me a "suction cup cam" that I could quickly stick on the thing just for dolly shots. The K3 is really annoying to keep your eye glued to the viewfinder with if you're attempting any kind of movement.

I was looking for ways to make dolly shots easier with my K3 when I stumbled on this guy's set-up. This is pretty ingenious if you ask me. But I'm curious as to what parts I would buy to set something like this up? Does anybody have any idea how to rig something like this up?

you might die from electrical shock, but if nice lighting is your only concern you can get a very nice looking $99 Arri clone on eBay brand new in any flavor...300, 650, 1K. I did it. So far I didn't die. We'll see if I eventually do though. In that case, I would NOT recommend them. So keep track of whether or not I die. I would definitely ask the seller if they know their source well enough to ensure the safety of the lights they get (tell them you've heard bad things about them being hit or miss - they are).

I don't understand why "unnatural" has been lumped in with "cheesy" unfairly. I think if anything is old hat and totally tired and ready for the grave, it's "normal" looking stuff.

Here is the final product. I figured I'd post it here once it finally got released in conjunction with the album. Thanks for the help and discussion everyone. I have a lot to learn, but I love doing it. http://vimeo.com/109653614

Hello. I figured I'd better try my luck here. Ebay seems a little low on reliable pieces. I am looking to invest in a working Moviscop viewer/editor system with rewinds. The hope is to set up shop in the basement of my new rented house here, to edit 16mm reversal for shorts and animations. Anything comparable will be of interest as well. I have just heard the Moviscop is very user friendy and won't scratch film easily. The main thing is, I just need a personal set-up to do manual viewing/editing. Thanks.

Ah! Good point. Especially since mine was shipped with the incorrect mount and was sent a replacement to put on myself. Don't know exactly how I could screw that up, but I guess it's possible too. And yeah, good call. I'll try to just shift that around, plus a few other ideas that kind folks have mentioned on and off the board....thanks all. Much appreciated as always. It'd take lifetimes to achieve a few steps without you. Don;t underestimate the value your input gives certain people. Best, Matthew

Thank you for the replies! I appreciate the information. Collimation is likely the culprit (looks like). Although my personal understanding of lenses needs collimation as well. I can at least get that onto the focal plane of my mind for now!

Here is the very bad test footage in question. Embarassed. But then again, I kind of just whipped out the camera and took a fast reading with all existing light. So I'm not too mad at myself. But still, messing up the Peleng focus is driving me pretty crazy since I genuinely cannot see it.

Hello. I got some 16mm Tri-X 7266 footage back from the lab, which I had shot on my K3 with a bunch of primes (Peleng 8mm; Pentax SMC Takumar 50mm/1.4; Carl Zeiss Jennar 135/3.5) and the stock Meteor zoom (17-69mm), and the tests confirmed a hunch from previous footage....it's near impossible to "see" the focus correctly during the shoot using my Peleng 8mm. Almost all the other lenses, especially the stock zoom, seem to be DEAD ON just by zooming in and eye-balling the focus. I make mistakes due to moving the camera sometimes while using fixed primes, which obviously can cause a really unintentional blurring in and out look, but that's operator error. What I'm asking is...when using the widest angle lenses like Peleng 8mm, why is it so incredibly hard to actually "visualize" the focus? I keep thinking I'm nailing it while shooting (sometimes it just ALL LOOKS THE SAME through the lens), and then footage comes back and its "sort of off". Not horrible, but many shots I'd be unhappy with using in any real project. Kind of bothers me until I get a few tips on how to accurately use the Peleng. Because I need that for my wide shots. But it's just completely making me unconfident when my footage comes back all wonky. Here is a link to the shots. You can obviously tell which ones are the Peleng (not just for the focus issues, but because you can see which ones are wider - the recording studio shots etc). Anyway, this test came out pretty darn bad overall. But I'm learning how to treat Tri-X as a result. Which is nice. Any suggestions on maintaining a REAL focus using that Peleng? It just all looks the same through the viewfinder on that one. Do I need to break out the measuring tape for all those shots? I guess so. Is this a collimation issue? It's a new lens. Although....I did have a band spit beer on it....like directly on it for a shot during a shoot once. But I cleaned it all off using wipes and learned not to do that one again. Video uploading to Vimeo....will return when my non-free account has "converted it" in 45 mins!

How can you misunderstand a sphere?

Knowing nothing about electrical wiring (and I mean NOTHING), I suppose I'll test them by either living or dying when I turn them on in October.

The very personal reason I prefer all film to all digital is because of the analogy film offers. The way film captures light is dependant upon mechanical processes that provide an infinitely variable sampling of light. It is not rendered as approximations on "a grid" of pixels. No matter how minute, and how "invisible" to the naked eye, does not matter one bit. It is the sheer concept. You are accepting the concept of stereotyping light. Reducing the infinite. It is like pretending nothing exists outside your scope of sensory perception. It's a statement to choose that (one way or another!). I'm sure I'm not the first person in the world to say this, but then again I haven't read or heard anyone else discuss it so here it is...the idea of a mechanical, ever-shifting plane that catches light in infinitely variable patterns is to me just a much more beautiful analogy to life. And it's like how memory works...imperfect....in science anyway. You recall your memory later....it is imperfect! The light bends and breaks into miniscule shapes on the film grain...the grains almost talk to each other on a subconscious level. They RE-FORM a NEW PICTURE. What the %^&* is digital? Beautiful LOOKING? Ok. Beautiful like a computer's motherboard design though. It's beauty is totally in its rigor, that's it. In it's "Swiss Time Piece" quality. I see where this would serve a bread-winner well. But not necessarily an artist who is thinking about bigger picture concerns than where he is getting his next sandwich. This is where the river seems to carve the valley between us as camera operators, cinematographers, directors, whatever when it comes to choice of media. Whether your value system resides in clinical precision, budget, or other "wordly" concerns...or if you just are in it for the art of it (or at least the "art of it" is a major and driving factor in your work). Many people have to eat! I get it. Another hard-hitting brick of truth! But at the same time, I don't think I could ever become romantically involved with a "Swiss Time Piece". And since my goal is to keep pure what I love to do, I pretty much have subconsciously (well, consciously now, I suppose) resigned myself to keeping that compartmentalized away from my breakfast table and toilet, where crude activities occur. I don't want a string of dependency between the two. That affect my decisions. I keep a day job that I particularly hate in order to make money there, because in that sector of my life, it is the crude region that serves these purposes nicely. For art, the concern is ideological, and when it comes to ideology, there is no way I can accept anything that keeps most of its fundamental stance rooted in cold capture, cold facts like that. I like to look at the Crate & Barrell catalog covers too sometimes. But have you ever actually felt great in a room that looked like that? It's almost inhumane. I don't want to either buy or sell that kind of calculated beauty. Does anyone else ever think about stuff like this? Not trying to be rude. But there is a lot of talk about simply rendering image, and not as much about this component of the metaphysics and allegorical components of our choices. By the way, I haven't been to a single workshop on filmmaking, let alone film school. So you can view that nug for what it's worth to you. It's a fact I'm comfortable with.

I think a lot of things in life come down to what you are willing to sacrifice in order to "better" what I guess you could call "yourself" or "your knowledge". If you are the type of person who always finds themselves reciting the sort of conclusions that start with phrases like, "if only I could..." or "...yeah I'd do that but..." or "I can't do it the way I want to do it because..." then you are basically just a loser and a winer. There are no two ways about it. I'm not saying you have to cut off your left hand and sell it to science in order to finance a film, but I am saying that there are people who make stuff happen and there are people who talk about making stuff happen. Most people who talk about making stuff happen do not realize they are in a loop of sheer noise. That's the type of person who would mostly argue with this post anyway to be honest. This isn't a hard rule, but it's largely truth. If you want to shoot a film on film for real reasons important to you, then you just have to save your money and make it happen. I'm not going to tell you how to do that. You just make it happen. I have had to do this with everything in my life, from a record label to films I am busting my butt now to get done and get done satisfactorily. Right now though, I'm largely a talker. That has to change. I change that with my actions. I give no sympathy for people who can't figure this stuff out on their own because I had to. The truth is not a wet blanket. It's more like a brick falling from a building. People who are after "the filmic look" are just conflating ideas they have about professional cinematography with film, largely as a circumstance of the sheer history of it. Many films, even those today's generation grew up loving, were (and are) shot on film. The toruble occurs once people start knowing this "fact". Once they know this "fact", they start conflating that with the "final product", intermingling it with their emotional response, and wa-la, nostalgia yields a lying monster that roams the corridoors of their minds searching and telling them to "do ittttt onnnnnn fiiiiiiiilmmmm". While I am totally partial to actual film myself, and would not be caught dead even reading literature on a digital camera for other reasons, I do realize that there are people who simply conflate the massive idea of "professional result" with "film". Now that I feel like an anthropology professor for the day, I better go do something productive, because I am right now currently just talking $%^& on a message board and becoming my own demise. By the way, this post is not a reaction to any one comment. It's a vibe reflector.

PPPPPPPS, I am renting a Kino Flo 4ft 4bank and a Mini Mole (I like little lights for shaping things unobtrusively and without the heft and enormously limiting power draw consideration on super small shoot like this). So I have a couple things covered. But, I really would like to be able to have my own trunk of gear "at my disposal" too. And it just always scares the poop out of me. Like I am staring at a box full of mousetraps I have to delicately wade through.

If you are a fool like me who invested money in his horrible As Arri clones and $30 red heads, how would you advise one in my situation in terms of SAFETY? Please no "throw them out now!" jokes. Not an option for me. But on a real and practical level, what to check for? Like I said before, I have called every electrician and service in the area and nobody knows what the hell I'm asking about when I ask them about checking my film lights for proper wiring and safety. It's as if they forgot how to wire anything suddenly and it's all Greek to them. What I need to know, and actually pretty desperately, is how often I need to assess these for safety so I don't torch myself someday. I don't have a PAT testing center here. I just have lights that work today, might not work tomorrow, or worst of all, might leak some current into my spine one day after a little rough-housing or lax storage. Last time I shot with them was in March, and they are in my basement in a big wooden military box I use for all my grip stuffs. Not particularly moist down there or anything, but you see where this is going. I have a real situation with practical advice needed. Shooting a short film with my first actual crew assembled in early October, and I need to make sure I don't fry anyone or myself. The light appears very nice and usable to me by the way. It's just the reliability I am always getting worked up over inside my head. Thanks for the help as always.

Somehow the thread I replied to diasappeared, so I'll try again here... I have a set of these that work fantastically. I tried to call about ten electricians in my area to look at them before use, but none of them seemed to know what to do to "check them" for safety. I ended up just buying GFI's and saying a prayer when I flipped the switch, and I still treat them as gingerly as can be, and give lectures about how sensitive they are to people when around them. They do work, and look beautiful, but the problem is, they seem to be completely hit or miss, and there seems to be no quality control or reliability between sets of these. So...in conclusion...if you are a gambling man, and/or have a pair of pliers in your back pocket, you can get a lot out of these. But I'd be the first to say in the same breath that if something goes terribly wrong one day, I do feel a little nervous putting my life in the hands of a GFI from Home Depot though... That said, haven't many people used total garbage solutions like these for many years on projects? I'm talking about all kinds of "consumer" lights...very likely "Chinese made" halogen worklights....things like that. It makes me curious about how real a threat there is. And on the subject...if this thing does shoot an electric sharge up my spine....is the GFI going to cut it off in time? Or what's the typical "real world danger" on GFI's anyway when using a 1K?

I have a set of these that work fantastically. I tried to call about ten electricians in my area to look at them before use, but none of them seemed to know what to do to "check them" for safety. I ended up just buying GFI's and saying a prayer when I flipped the switch, and I still treat them as gingerly as can be, and give lectures about how sensitive they are to people when around them. They do work, and look beautiful, but the problem is, they seem to be completely hit or miss, and there seems to be no quality control or reliability between sets of these. So...in conclusion...if you are a gambling man, and/or have a pair of pliers in your back pocket, you can get a lot out of these. But I'd be the first to say in the same breath that if something goes terribly wrong one day, I do feel a little nervous putting my life in the hands of a GFI from Home Depot though... That said, haven't many people used total garbage solutions like these for many years on projects? I'm talking about all kinds of "consumer" lights...very likely "Chinese made" halogen worklights....things like that. It makes me curious about how real a threat there is. And on the subject...if this thing does shoot an electric sharge up my spine....is the GFI going to cut it off in time? Or what's the typical "real world danger" on GFI's anyway when using a 1K?

To me, that's latitude.

To me it's really this simple: if I go out with a few rolls of color reversal, I will be sweating balls. If I go out with a few rolls of negative, I will not be sweating balls. I do not have a chart for this, but I do have several pairs of underwear that have logged the results.

Or actually...maybe just have something aiming across their faces from the side, as a very soft and generic fill that gives a lot of pop to the table surfaces and comes up to hit their faces and sort of distinghuishes whatever activity they are engaged in (in other words, rims the shapes enough, or basically fills key definitions of "them"). I just don't like how you can't see anything back there right now and it needs some creative slash of light to pick up the action.

Oh! One more lighting problem!...that background would turn way too black with that window knocked down (it's already in need of repair), so the folks in the background would need another touch of lighting magic. This I do not know how to do though...because my gut is telling me they HAVE to get it from the direction of that window (simulating the window light) but yeah, there is no room back there, so MAYBE just hide the lights behind the people and tell them to hold still?! Something like this.

I like to imagine that every film stock is as limited as reversal film. That way it FORCES my brain to think hard about nailing something. I just don;t like to allow myslef to be acknowledging lattitude. Negative stocks might have lattitude for miles, yes it might be there, but if you count on it too much, that's when the drunk driving begins. That vehicle starts to move more erratically. Sooner or later you'll hit a guard-rail thinking like that. The funny thing to me is...and I guess this is ironic considering what I just wrote...I follow the incident metering principles mentioned like a hawk, but when it comes to the act of backing it up with a spot meter, and taking it to the next level checking those relative exposures of various sections of a scene etc., I kind of veer off into another direction and do that part based way more on intuition (I have super limited experience, but I already do have a decent grasp on making sure a black is black or a light is light), so it's not that hard to figure out what a scene looks like "by eye" and use your human mind to figure out where to throw a hard or soft light, or bounce or flag something off with an object in the room or whatever. I mean, you can see (at least I can anyway) when a scene is completely going to have a deep set of blacks and blown out highlights. I don't think I want to be dallying around spot-metering for that stuff (because I just accept my creativity on that part - in the sense of a "painting" decision, not so much a "chemistry class" decision, if that makes sense). As for the exercise above...I don't know how you would do it, but I'd throw something over the glass to knock that window down at least two stops and then stick a single 1K above it, aiming downward at 45 degrees to rim their heads and ten bounce it off a white board to fill their faces. I'd also put a "creative" light on the African American gentleman, coming from the right side, and flag it so it does not hit the Caucasian gentle-woman. Then, I'd put some lame incidental room light in front of the man, just so it appears like "something" is justifying the extra burst of brightness onto him (but it wouldn't e strong enough to actually "do" much. Just basically be a prop.

Hi Gregg, no I perfectly understood what you meant. I may just not have communicated it back correctly! Yes, what you describe is what I am also talking about here...crudely put...the length of the lens expanding and contracting as it focuses. That's what you mean by axial shift, right? I can measure that and determine belt sizes based on the concept you've presented here, no problem. 3mm overlap is good to know up-front when buying the rings. This lets me know a rough standard, or marker.

Matthew - This is exactly how I operate, and will continue to! I'm totally of the mindset of (for lack of a better, maybe less loaded word) "punk rock" school of approaching things. I feel like if someone is standing around, they are a person like me, or anyone else. They can do something. If they don't know how to do something, they can probably be quickly taught to do at least something useful. Job titles comes after. Getting things happening in reality is the first goal, right? Sweat the knowledge, but don't ever sweat the rules. All they do is cause problems, whereas knowledge and will cause results.