GH4 What is your main lens on your Gimbal?

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dpavid

Active member
What lens are you guys using on your gimbal? Are you using more than one lens? If you're switching lens, do you have to re-balance your gimbal?

Curious what everyone's bread and butter lens is on their Gimbal.
 
I'm a super wide, super tight shooter. I usually use the Sigma 8-16 on gimbals and my Glidecam. It's really sharp, but not very fast.
 
If you do anything you have to rebalance. Change lens, zoom where lens extends, lens cap on/off.

You won't be able to manually change focus either, since obviously, that would necessitate touching the camera. Even if the lens has autofocus or a second person remotely controls focus, it can't change the lens weight distribution, e.g make the lens shorter or longer.

So with those caveats, probably good idea to have a prime lens and a set focus plane. I pretty much either have, say 1m-2meter as the focal plane and then focus with my feet or close the lens to f8 or over and have pretty much everything in focus.

Also worth thinking about a lightweight lens. Gimbals or more tiring than it may first appear. I use the Samyang 12mm mft lens most of the time, light, fast f2, wide, cheap.
 
I use a 17mm Oly f/1.8 on a stabilizer all the time and it's not wide enough. I don't think 15mm will be either. From my testing 11 or 12mm is the perfect focal length for the 4k crop. Now we just need Panasonic to come out with an 11mm f/1.8 and we'd be in the money :)

Cheers,
Pete
 
I use my Canon mount Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 with the Metabones speedbooster. Works great and is plenty wide with the speedbooster.
 
Great option but I was hoping to stay M43 and keep it simple. I might end up having to go this route anyway if I plan to get the Sigma f1.8 everyone is raving about.
 
I've used both the tokina and the sigma 1.8. The sigma is my go to lens for everything except closeups and gimbal. Keep in mind those are big heavy lens. The sigma is a tank.The speedbooster is heavier than you might think as well. Neither will give you autofocus if you want that or OIS. Just remember you may be trotting round with them for hours and take after take. You will notice the difference.
 
I've been using the Olympus 7-14 f2.8 and its been fantastic. Super sharp and wide.
 
dpavid said:
Great option but I was hoping to stay M43 and keep it simple. I might end up having to go this route anyway if I plan to get the Sigma f1.8 everyone is raving about.
Click to expand...

Rent the Sigma 18-35, and you will feel your pockets instantly get $1300 lighter when you add in the cost of the SpeedBooster!
 
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