mine

Recently my friend (and director) Clay purchased a Letus35 Extreme for his commercial and music video projects but also for a short film we’re shooting next month. The Letus is an adapter for using 35mm lenses on non-35mm cameras. He brought the adaptor up and a Panasonic HVX200 for a little test and fun. So what did we learn?

Well, for his camera at least, our settings were 73 on the zoom, 50 on the focus, and the iris on the camera is set to wide open, which is approximately ƒ/2. First we wanted to see what the Lensbaby would look like. The movie below is with the Lensbaby and no iris ring (ƒ/2). If you notice the vignette on the left side. That’s the adaptor’s ground glass. We know that we’re seeing it because we didn’t zoom in enough but what we don’t know is why it’s not centered. If we were to zoom in into the ground glass to clear the left edge of the ground glass, we end up with lots of room on the right that would go unused. Research time. The Lensbaby was manipulated by hand.

Watch the test…

Here we shot with a Nikon 50mm prime lens. It was at end of the day with the clouds in the sky after a day of rain. We poured water on the ground and shot the falling water at 60 f.p.s., preset the white balance to 3200K, 12dB gain, shutter at 1/250 (35.6° 35mm equivalent*) and the taking lens set at ƒ/1.4.

Watch the other test…

Letus claims that their lens adapter has a 1/2-stop loss of light and by our estimation, based on how we set up the camera the camera, we rated his camera set-up at 200 E.I.

Conversion formula:
Shutter speed to shutter angle: 24 x 360 / inverse of the video shutter speed = shutter angle equivalent => For example, 1/250 would be: 24 x 360 / 250 = 34.56 shutter angle equivalent
Shutter angle to shutter speed: 24 x 360 / shutter angle = n where , 1/n is the shutter speed equivalent => For example 180° would be: 24 x 360 / 180 = 1/48
FYI, the 24 x 360 = 8640