Hi guys,
Just something I had on my mind late in the evening when I should really be sleeping.
I've offered to help shooting some atmospheric / heat-of-the moment shots for a sports event. It will be the finale of a documentary following three athletes as they prepare for and finally compete in the event. I'm going in with minimal gear and native lenses, the 25mm Panaleica and the 7-14mm. I'm more used to manual focusing Canon FD lenses for video, but frankly I don't have much experience to begin with.
Anyway, I've been practicing shooting with the lenses still new to me. With the touchscreen and fly-by-wire focusing of the lenses, I was wondering why the camera wouldn't be able to help me focus better. With a static scene you can touch the screen and tell the camera to focus on a specific area on the frame. Very neat and all, but quite limited. I had something a bit more elaborate in mind. A couple examples:
A predefined focus pull. Say you have a shot with a sunset over a lake and a person staring into it. You make a 90 degree pan from the horizon to the person's face standing next to you. It would be nice if you could mark two focus points after you've carefully focused into them. In this case say infinity and 3 feet. Then by your command you could make the camera carry out a slow (or fast, you get to decide) focus pull for you as you concentrate on panning the shot.
A 'dolly zoom' focus assist. With the 7-14mm you can get an almost workable perspective effect hand-held when you start at 14mm and move closer to your subject as you zoom out to 7mm to maintain the subject's size in the frame. It would be nice to tell the camera you're going for it. The camera could record the focus distance at 14mm and as you start zooming out, it would work out how much you'd have to move and focus closer accordingly. I can figure this out on paper so surely the camera could too.
Then finally some tweaks for manual focusing. Occasionally I'd like the focus action on the 25mm to be just a bit faster or a lot slower. Could this not be setting in the camera? Also maybe optionally the focus could emulate mechanical linkage better by treating the focus ring action directly as an indication of focus distance. If you'd turn the focus ring a quarter turn very quickly and it would be too fast for the camera, it could go on for a brief moment after the indicated focus distance is reached. This would make manual focus pulls a bit easier. The Olympus-way is great, but these lenses could have some options too.
Maybe the way the focus is driven in the lenses makes these very difficult / impossible to implement and I'm overlooking some stuff trivial to the more educated. But as I see a focus scale when I move the focus, I was thinking the camera knows the focus distance and focal length, why couldn't the video tab on the touch screen hide some interesting features for focusing.
Any thoughts or further ideas?
Just something I had on my mind late in the evening when I should really be sleeping.
I've offered to help shooting some atmospheric / heat-of-the moment shots for a sports event. It will be the finale of a documentary following three athletes as they prepare for and finally compete in the event. I'm going in with minimal gear and native lenses, the 25mm Panaleica and the 7-14mm. I'm more used to manual focusing Canon FD lenses for video, but frankly I don't have much experience to begin with.
Anyway, I've been practicing shooting with the lenses still new to me. With the touchscreen and fly-by-wire focusing of the lenses, I was wondering why the camera wouldn't be able to help me focus better. With a static scene you can touch the screen and tell the camera to focus on a specific area on the frame. Very neat and all, but quite limited. I had something a bit more elaborate in mind. A couple examples:
A predefined focus pull. Say you have a shot with a sunset over a lake and a person staring into it. You make a 90 degree pan from the horizon to the person's face standing next to you. It would be nice if you could mark two focus points after you've carefully focused into them. In this case say infinity and 3 feet. Then by your command you could make the camera carry out a slow (or fast, you get to decide) focus pull for you as you concentrate on panning the shot.
A 'dolly zoom' focus assist. With the 7-14mm you can get an almost workable perspective effect hand-held when you start at 14mm and move closer to your subject as you zoom out to 7mm to maintain the subject's size in the frame. It would be nice to tell the camera you're going for it. The camera could record the focus distance at 14mm and as you start zooming out, it would work out how much you'd have to move and focus closer accordingly. I can figure this out on paper so surely the camera could too.
Then finally some tweaks for manual focusing. Occasionally I'd like the focus action on the 25mm to be just a bit faster or a lot slower. Could this not be setting in the camera? Also maybe optionally the focus could emulate mechanical linkage better by treating the focus ring action directly as an indication of focus distance. If you'd turn the focus ring a quarter turn very quickly and it would be too fast for the camera, it could go on for a brief moment after the indicated focus distance is reached. This would make manual focus pulls a bit easier. The Olympus-way is great, but these lenses could have some options too.
Maybe the way the focus is driven in the lenses makes these very difficult / impossible to implement and I'm overlooking some stuff trivial to the more educated. But as I see a focus scale when I move the focus, I was thinking the camera knows the focus distance and focal length, why couldn't the video tab on the touch screen hide some interesting features for focusing.
Any thoughts or further ideas?