Zeiss Jena Sonnar

Here’s a quick compilation of some footage I shot in the pouring rain last week. It’s really nothing that interesting but it was a fun day out getting to know the Sonnar a little better and dealing with the challenges of shooting in the rain. This is shot with a 2.20 aspect ratio which has become my preferred wide screen format using Magic Lantern RAW. Capturing 2.20 (1920 by 872) takes some pressure off the KomputerBay 1066x 128GB card although I’ve successfully used it for full HD RAW. It was such a gloomy day I decided to go black and white with this one (my first!). A RAW workflow is probably overkill for something like this but the new tools I’m using are so fast on a MacBook Pro Retina that RAW has finally become a viable workflow. I’m using RawMagic to convert the MLVs to CinemaDNG and ClipHouse for transcoding to ProRes 422.

My rig for the day was a Canon 5D3, Zeiss Jena Sonnar 2.8/180 mounted to a Fotga follow focus. I didn’t end up doing any focus pulls due to the hassle of holding an umbrella but the Fotga certainly makes the huge Sonnar easier to handle. The Fotga baseplate was mounted to a Varavon 815FH fluid head on top of a Benro C2182TB1 carbon fibre flat tripod. I’ve been really impressed with the Benro tripod and will do a write up on it later along with the Arca Swiss quick release system I use on all my gear.