Poor results on exteriors with Letus.

[Dennis Wood]

There are three things I would strongly recommend:

1. Use a polarizer on your Nikon lens directly or via mattebox when you shoot outside. That cuts about a stop of exposure where you need it depending on the camera's relative position to the sun. More importantly it reduces glare and richens the greens and blues a ton.

2. Try and beg/borrow or steal one of the Zeiss ZF mount primes for a test. These lenses make a huge difference in terms of MTF vs anything we tested. If you look at our EX1/Zeiss lens tests in Cinevate's Video University, you'll see back to back comparisons between a Nikon 50mm and Zeiss 50mm lens. When we first viewed the footage on our 42" panel, I was sure someone had messed with the camera settings until we realized we were looking at the back-to-back shots.

Without exception, every single one of our sponsored shooters has ended up using the Zeiss lenses on almost everything they do.

Cheers,
Dennis

 

[Lenilenapi]

Here's my guess from looking quickly at your pictures.

1. Mainly you have overexposed. I don't know why without looking over your settings, but Auto Iris is a dangerous way to shoot and when I do I always set the Iris to slightly underrexpose. Its easy to accidently have the EX auto set to slightly overexpose without realizing it. It could be that simple since in many of these shots the auto wouldn't neccessarily overexpose normally. You can check that on the EX viewfinder as its one of the settings easily accessed there, and easily hit by accident and misadjusted as well.

Black person next to a white person is always tricky as you can easily over or under expose one of them though.

2. Your camera settings may simply be too washed out as it looks like you don't have any blacks or saturation. Are you shooting with Cinegamma. If so you need to underexpose slightly or you can badly compress your highlights as here.


The adapter will make overexposure even worse and will tend flatten contrast, but it is unlikely to be the cause of the problem unless everything else you shoot looks great.

3. I don't think you don't need to shoot with a Polarizer except in situations that warrant it. Not neccessary for good color though it it can be aesthetic choice. Personally I don't know anyone who shoots with it as a general rule though I always carry one.

4. You are also out of focus on a number of shots. That could be your adapter set-up or simply missing your focus point on the 35mm lens. too many variables to second guess.


I could be wrong about your experience, but all in all it just likes you need to spend more time learning your gear and your technical craft. Chalk it up to experience. You can fix it some in post but you can't bring back an overexposed face.