Category: Making Videos

Focusing on all of my efforts around the art of making videos and social media. Camera, lens, and equipment reviews. I also share tutorials on anything I have learned over the years.

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Discussing Color Grading and LUTs

After my first experience with color profiles on my Panasonic G7, I steered away from changing the settings on the camera. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just followed what other vloggers said to do.

The problem is… most vloggers what the most neutral color palette from the camera, so they can tweak the colors in editing.

Who wants to do extra work?

If you are using a few different cameras in the same video, I understand the desire to have the same color science through all clips, but I am sticking to the default settings.

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Sony 35mm F 1.8 Lens Review

I recently purchased a Sony 35mm F1.8 lens (SEL35F18F) and paired it with my A7C to make this review.

The low light performance is very good, but at the end of the video I was overly optimistic about the low light performance (I literally shut all of the lights off), as expected the ISO ramped up and caused some grain.

It still looked sharp and clear with very minimal lighting and I am looking forward to playing around with background lighting when I use it again.

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More Fun With Green Screens

This is a short video of me messing around with a new green screen.

I bought a pull-up style green screen (vs the bendable version) to see if it would be easier to set up and create less shadows (since it wasn’t hanging).

Set up was definitely easier, but lighting is lighting (unfortunately).

Link to Neewer Green Screen:
https://amzn.to/3hIFpzT

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Canon FD Lens Aperture Lock

A quick follow-up on the “Old Canon Lenses” vlog I posted a few weeks ago…

Those over-exposed pictures really bothered me and I realized that the aperture blades in the lens were not moving when I moved the ring.

Canon FD aperture blades will lock at 5.6 if you don’t manually unlock them or make sure you have an adapter that has an unlocking mechanism. The K&F Lens Mount Adapter does have this feature.

Even though I figured out the issue, I am not sure if these manual lenses are for me. But I am learning more.

This video also has detailed instructions on how to unlock Canon FD aperture blades:

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Tripod and Mounting Plate Ecosystems

I am so tired of having to take mounting plates off my camera and screwing new ones on when I need to use different sized tripods.

After looking at a Peak Design video for their newish tripod, I saw how their one mounting plate interchanged with all of their capture systems – and I wondered if I can find a 3rd party adapter so I can use ONE PLATE for all of my tripods.

Spoiler: The answer is yes.
(The key is to find something Arca-Swiss Standard)

Here are links to the products I discussed in the video: