my first video shoot with my Nikon DSLR -- I did everything wrong

J

JyBorg

Senior Member
Wow, today was an incredible learning experience. I've done a lot of shooting with video cameras and my favourite cam to use is actually a low-level documentary camera, Canon XH-A1s, using a Brevis adapter to put interchangable lenses on it. So after playing around with my Nikon D3300 for awhile I decided to take it on a shoot.

However, I still set up my Canon and asked a friend to back me up with her Canon 5D MK III and I'm glad I did, because without these two cameras for coverage I'd have failed miserably.

The biggest mistake I made was using the wrong lenses for the shooting conditions. I'm going to pick up the Nikon 85mm 1.8 lens in the next couple of days and I'm going to buy an external LED monitor with focus peaking. I haven't slept yet tonight. I've spend the last 5 hours going over my footage with a fine-tooth comb and searching the internet for answers as to what I did wrong.

Tonight was a great learning experience... probably the best experience I could have had... and I'm eager to go out and do things right this time. This is exactly like when I lost my first boxing match.

Just had to vent. My foresight prevented a total failure and I learned a lot because of it.

I'm also considering buying the D750 because one day soon I'm going to need to retire my video cameras. What I'd really like is a Panasonic GH4 with a metabones speedbooster to adapt my Nikon lenses, but I don't think the metabones adapter will work on my lens mounts. If that's the case then I'm definitely getting the D750 instead of investing in several new lenses.
 
W

WayneF

Senior Member
You never said what your problem was, so I doubt we can suggest any help. My stab at it however, would be to abandon the lens converter and use the regular Nikon lens, and higher ISO if you need it. I suspect the gadget is the problem.

The converter, as well as for converting lens mounts, appears to be a wide angle adapter, like is sometimes used on astronomical telescopes, to provide a wider field of view. The opposite of a teleconverter, and the shorter focal length makes the aperture seem wider too. Telescopes are fixed, but on a camera, we can instead simply use a wider lens, and eliminate all that extra distortion causing glass. And today, high ISO works really well, esp for movies. The movie mode will be auto ISO except in camera Manual mode. And it works. Try it.

I don't understand their G and F distinctions, they seem to have it wrong. All Nikon DSLR is F mounts. The G adapter says the manual aperture is required, no electrical connection. However a Nikon G lens means there is no manual aperture, and electrical connection is required (and most are G lenses today). Sorry, but if I had a Nikon camera and a Nikon lens, I think this contraption is the last thing I'd want.
 
J

JyBorg

Senior Member
WayneF said:
You never said what your problem was, so I doubt we can suggest any help. My stab at it however, would be to abandon the lens converter and use the regular Nikon lens, and higher ISO if you need it. I suspect the gadget is the problem.

The converter, as well as for converting lens mounts, appears to be a wide angle adapter, like is sometimes used on astronomical telescopes, to provide a wider field of view. The opposite of a teleconverter, and the shorter focal length makes the aperture seem wider too. Telescopes are fixed, but on a camera, we can instead simply use a wider lens, and eliminate all that extra distortion causing glass. And today, high ISO works really well, esp for movies. The movie mode will be auto ISO except in camera Manual mode. And it works. Try it.

I don't understand their G and F distinctions, they seem to have it wrong. All Nikon DSLR is F mounts. The G adapter says the manual aperture is required, no electrical connection. However a Nikon G lens means there is no manual aperture, and electrical connection is required (and most are G lenses today). Sorry, but if I had a Nikon camera and a Nikon lens, I think this contraption is the last thing I'd want.
Click to expand...

My two real problems were that a lot of the footage has soft focus issues and that I used the kit lens because I thought that there was more chance of me screwing things up if I relied on my manual lenses. So the final result is that both my auto-focused shots and manually focused shots have soft focus issues and the footage is super, super grainy.

An external monitor would solve the focus issues and now I know I should have gone with fast 1.8 lens. I'm very glad this happened on the project it did because I was able to work around it and prevent a true catastrophe.
 
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