Peter Welander

If it turns out that it is a 67 mm thread, I have a SOM Berthiot aluminum screw-in lens cap and no relevant lens. I'll mail it to you as a kind gesture if it's what you need. Peter.

It's been a while since I've seen it, but Tess (of the d'Urbervilles) by Roman Polanski in 1979 opens with one long shot beginning with a panorama of the English countryside and slowly cranes down to follow a group of girls walking down a country path. I think the film won various awards, including an Oscar, for its cinematography. It's pretty striking when you realize it's one continuous shot.

If you want to see an enjoyable picture of a struggling cinema trying to make it, check out The Smallest Show on Earth from 1957. (It's available on Filmstruck, so enjoy it there while you can.) Peter Sellers as the projectionist trying to cope with ancient machinery, Margaret Rutherford as the box office lady who accepts a plucked chicken in exchange for tickets, etc. Great understated British comedy. BTW, has there been any discussion on this forum regarding the demise of Filmstruck? Sad news indeed.

Looking at that rig, those look like focusable light sources with mirrors very close to the viewing axis, my guess is it's designed to look down some type of bore. Does that lens have any particularly close focusing capability? Hard to tell but is that some sort of extension on the mount? BTW, I once bought a 16 mm magazine camera. An old Revere or some such... Certainly among the worlds's most expensive film delivery systems.

You could do worse than a Nikon F3. It has the old-fashioned quality you seem to want, but doesn't necessarily have to be old. That camera was produced for 20+ years and was still available new in this century. Built like a tank, manual focus, but it does have aperture-preferred auto exposure if you like. You do have to advance the film manually, but the massive heavy motor drive is cool and not hard to find. The big clunky body would be a stand-out these days.

I never realized that Sony built a camera with a mechanical shutter and optical viewfinder. Besides Arri, are there others?

Retaining the connection to the M43 mount, is anybody using the JVC GY LS300? It looks like an interesting and kind of odd camera. Far more conventional form factor, super 35 sensor but only 8 bit. Same price range as a GH5s.

So what the discussion ultimately says is that any camera (maybe even my AF-100), used under ideal conditions by someone who understands its strengths and limitations, can produce lovely images, or the artist can effectively feature the quirks of a given format, such as Super8 (Including references to Jules and Alba...) to produce a desired effect. Some tools are more universal that others, but those come at a price. Pick the one that works best for your kind of shooting within your budget. There also the fact that newer is not necessarily better. Discussions show up here regularly about the virtues of older platforms, such as an Arri D21. It's old but still has its enthusiasts. Naturally when it comes to film, when working with quality equipment age is not a factor. Same for lenses.

I've been having similar thoughts. I've been working with AF-100s (please, it's not polite to snicker) and have accumulated a fair number of lenses, most of which are actually Nikon mount with adapters. I've been looking at the BMCC off and on (along with the JVC GY LS300) as a useful alternative. The conventional wisdom on the BMCC that I've seen says: • The camera's screen is useless when working outdoors • Beware of odd dropped frames • Beware of pointing it at a strong light source, which I would also assume means don't change lenses in bright light • It has crummy audio control • No internal ND filters All of these could be incorrect or exaggerated. On the audio topic, does it work well with a line-level feed from a field mixer, or is an external recorder necessary? Thanks.

Who was the guy...Jack Cardiff or Michael Powell, somebody from that era...who referred to the massive enclosed Technicolor camera as the "enchanted cottage."

My Dinner with Andre, Louis Malle, 1981. Almost two hours of two-person conversation and it works somehow.

Once I got a blu-ray player, I bought a couple older movies just to see if there was any improvement. Specifically 2001 and Dune (David Lynch). They are both spectacular as blu-rays. I can't say I've searched for either of those on Netflix or similar, but I suspect they might be hard to find. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, but I have a hard time believing we'll ever be able to give up optical media. I've got FilmStruck now, but it's surprising what isn't on that service... Nonetheless, HD streaming is pretty spectacular too if you can find the titles you're looking for. Even MHz and the PBS streaming service.

I've looked at this string a couple times thinking it must be some sort of analogy--something about complex procedures and risks. If you would never risk fixing your own brakes, why would you start taking apart a zoom lens or think you can do your own focusing screen adjustments. That kind of thing.

I'm trying to figure out why changing the turret would require adjusting the ground glass. Isn't the ground glass "tied" more to the film plane? Wouldn't doing something to the turret affect both equally? Or am I missing something? Of course there is that long optical path to the ground glass... Thanks.

I never heard the answer to Simon's question: "By the way, there has been a 16mm camera that offered direct viewing of the image on the film stock. Who knows the name?"