The Nikon DF was not made for video but as you can see it can do it, although it is stuck with overlays, with current firmware. It would not be a huge task for Nikon to turn that off. It's liveview is 1080p 30 fps which is about the standard of the day. I have an accsoon cineeye which is a hdmi video transmitter (it supports up to 4 smart phones simultaneously and a range of 300 feet) it includes focus peaking false colours , zebras and even luts and recording. while it would be better with a clean feed you can record video from a Nikon DF.

videophobic DF users, do not follow this link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZR1kM169YA

Panasonic actually charge for better firmware for video,
It's Video which helps drive things like fast accurate autofocus and better stabilization. Lens designs with constant aperture across the zoom range. fast lenses...

Thing is when you make it to the desk , they say no you don't :)

Hi i was over getting my eyes tested when i noticed something odd.

(Download)

There are quite a few brands making speed boosters, Viltrox is the main alternative but there are others I bought the Neewer pixco .72x for less than 100 euro and I use it for Pentax lenses. I'm also using a Gimbal with a rod mount focus motor. It can be easily programmed for A B moves or controlled from the handle. What can be handy with the more expensive adapters is they can power optical image stabilization thats built into the lens, if the lens has it of course. If you are using manual lenses non of that applies to the speedbooster The Sigma 18-35 Art is a great lens but pretty expensive and heavy.

The main thing really is that it helps bring the lens into a more useful focal range. For my Panasonic , BMPCC 4K and BMPCC they have crop factors of 2x 1.9x and 2.88x respectively so the 18 has the effective view of 36mm on the Panasonic with the speed booster its about a 26mm field of view and the extra stop of light is pretty useful.

Native lenses are lighter and cheaper and more useful if you want features.
For my Panasonic my f2.8 70-200 becomes effectively an F2 140 - 400 but doesnt get stabilization , although there are bodies with IBIS these days. ...

Hi All
I've just been playing round with a speedbooster and figuring out it's effect the one i'm using is a Pixco and has a 0.72 crop factor
I paired it with a sigma 18-30mm lens f3.5 - f4.5 which is f4 + or - 1/3rd of a stop so pretty much an F4.

With the speed booster multiplying the crop factor by the f-stop gives the boosted aperture which is pretty much 1 stop difference
so f4 becomes f2.88 or just f2.8 really (about 2.52 to 3.24 for my sigma).
Field of view is a combination of lens crop factor x booster crop factor.
M43 (2x) x 0.72 = 1.44 100mm lens 144mm
bmpcc4k (1.9) x 0.72 = 1.37 100mm lens 137mm
bmpcc6k (1.588) x 0.72 = 1.14 100mm lens 114mm
bmpcc (2.88) x 0.72 = 2.07 100mm lens 207mm

Field of View is probably something you can work with the 100mm lens field of view can be from 114 to 207mm for video it depends on resolution which also maybe a windowed mode which makes the sensor effectively smaller. F-stop is not the same as T-stop it's not just aperture that controls how much light gets through but the lens elements and coatings will reduce the light reaching the sensor as well.

The Speedbooster can also increase flaring and a loss of contrast, so not entirely a free lunch but does make manual lenses more useful.
I hope this was interesting. crop factor can be a calculated a couple of ways it's easiest to use the width, if you use the diagonal then you have to allow for the aspect ratio of different sensors.

I am a fan of lightroom and bought lightroom 5.71 around 2014 on a DVD for Mac & Windows for around 140 Euro's I first installed it on my first Macbook which ran osx 10.7, unfortunately when lightroom 6 was released it wasn't compatible or I might have bought that when it was still available. Since then I have bought other software including Affinity Photo before it was even ported to Windows I also bought Affinity Designer and Publisher and have had regular free updates for all 3.

I don't think there is a better photo organizer than lightroom, most of my raw files are in dng format natively. I have one camera which isn't directly supported by lightroom 5.71 and adobe helpfully provides thier free dng converter. They also have the free adobe bridge which also does photo organisation but you need to create your own folder organisation but it's really designed to work with photoshop but it will work with affinity photo.
The other reason for using lightroom is its ability to pass photos to external plugins and applications so lightroom is like my home base for me.

When Apple released later versions of OSX that wouldn't run 32 bit applications the installer was broken and just recently Apple released M1 macs which use Arm CPUs which is a different instruction set to the x86 instruction set Lightroom was designed to run on. I had lightroom 5.71 installed on an external hard drive which I plugged into my M1 mini with apple not having a registry I decided to start up lightroom on the drive and it crashed. However I decided to give it another shot and copied it over to my m1 macs application folder and tried to run it from there. This time it ran and asked me to register it or use it in trial mode, I opted for trial mode and developed a few photo's with it it worked fine but i knew i would want the lens and camera profiles so i also dragged over the adobe folder in library/application support. Which worked out fine and then dug out my Lightroom DVD and registered lightroom.

Lightroom 6 will probably also work similarly, however they do have a license check which requires Adobes servers to authenticate once in a while this will not be a problem unless Adobe decommissions them which will happen eventually. With the cost of my lightroom purchase and the cost of my m1 mac mini, I probably have spent the same as Gene over the years. It's probably fair to say not going the subscription route has saved me enough to pay for the Mac Mini. The Subscription route would cost me more than Gene because of additional taxes, and exchange rates, so i'm also quite happy not to be taxed on the photos i take each month. I have found a few copies of lightroom 5 on ebay but not lightroom 6.

Are you using the monitor mirrored? if so change to extended if you can and the display should be native to the monitor and not scaled which seems to be whats happening I have a qhd 27" benq and that looks great to my eyes, i avoided 4k since it would tend to make things a bit small on screen. from benq "a 27” QHD monitor has a pixels per inch rating of 108, an ideal figure. The same screen with a resolution of 3840 x 2160 has a PPI/DPI of over 160, which is just too much detail for the eyes to comfortably resolve."

For your imac it has a QHD resolution natively 2560x1440 so if that looks fine normally then that should be ok for you.

What can you resolve? for an 8 by 10 print 300dpi is fine at a normal viewing distance some where it was figured 10 line pairs per mm is pretty much as detailed as you need to be to not be able to resolve the lines with 25.4mm to the inch that corresponds with 254 lines per inch so 300 dpi is overkill really If you want a bigger print you can use a lower dpi as you view it from further back.

Cropping you can get a pretty good idea of crop factor dividing your image into 3rds and 1/4s if we start with 1/4s each 1/4 represents a 2x crop factor if the lens was a 50mm then 1/4 of the frame is a 2x crop or 100mm field of view if you divide into 1/3rds horizontally and vertically and use 4 of those thirds you have a 1.5 crop and that part of the image from a 50mm lens has a 75mm field of view if you take a single third thats a 3x crop and you are now looking at a 150mm field of view from that 50mm lens. depending on the sensor that 1/3rd section is probably too much to crop to.
An 8x 12" at 300 dpi is roughly 8.6Mpix and for my 36mpix camera the most i would want to crop is 2x if i wanted a reasonable IQ if I don't crop at all i'm looking at about 600dpi and at a normal viewing distance for an 8 by 12 i wouldn't resolve the image any better than the 300 dpi image.

To be fair this is of more use in the field, if the bit you are interested in is only a 1/9th of the frame you really want to swop to a lens 3x longer a 1/4 2x longer or 4/9ths 1.5x longer these longer lenses will be designed to perform at these distances. I hope this is useful. To be fair if you are going to crop into your image you need to raise your shutter speed by a stop or more too.

Neewer is essentially a 2nd tier brand that sells to retailers and you if you wish, they don't really do customer service unless forced (e.g bought on Amazon) Customer service tends to be found at the retail level. If you bought at bobs camera store then bob took his markup and deals with the customer when things go wrong. Bobs also a regular customer of neewer buying a lot of product so neewer will be nicer to bob.

In practice buying direct from neewer is ok if there isn't too much to go wrong, for more expensive items if buying via amazon it might be worth paying for the buyer protection which hopefully will pay out when there are issues.

I recently bought an M1 Mac Mini and today i hooked up an old 2TB external which has an El Capitan install on it. In the apps folder was lightroom 5, so being curious I decided to open it and it crashed. On Mac applications are largely self contained what we know as an app is actually an application folder(if you right click you can get into it). so i decided to copy it to the M1 Mini's application folder. I ran it from there and this time it asked for a serial number or use as a 30 day free trial. I went for the trial and to my surprise it works. So after developing a few photos i decided i should register it and dug out the disk and serial number and with the serial no entered it was registered.

I've been lead to believe it's a 32bit app and stopped working several OS versions ago. Must be just the installer which is 32 bit and while its not native on the mac mini once translated with rosetta 2 it seems quite snappy.

So still no need for an adobe subscription :)

You don't say what mac it is but if it's one of the new M1 models the driver for the card reader may be not available just yet. Probably if you look in system report and USB the card reader will be listed, so it's a driver issue. Chances are the card reader manufacturer will have a forum and you can ask there if they plan on supporting that product on M1 macs. If they are still currently manufacturing it , the answer will most likely be yes.

Chances are the camera can connect as a mass storage device on usb and you can copy the files over that way. Or maybe use a different computer to copy the files to an ssd drive (i wouldn't use a usb memory stick these days as they are very slow for reading and writing).

Well maybe the easiest way is to use a nas to collect your photos on to a single drive, have it as a share on your different computers and maybe create a folder for each machine, you could use an external drive for collecting the photos. Once you have them on a single drive then you might import into lightroom and that will naturally organise them by date taken (if the camera had the date and time set when you took them). Your bound to get some duplicates which is going to be the slow part.

I mean personally I use lightroom for all my photos and I keep them on a nas drive which I have connected in lightroom I also have another nas which backs up to another drive every couple of hours. Wasn't so simple to set up but it's easy now.

Photography is and i think always will be, an imperfect view of the world. Film stocks have characteristics that go with the formulation of the film. Kodacolor gold was much stronger in color than the scene that you saw. Even our eyes don't see the same as we age, so really we are giving an impression of the world, not reality.

Where do you stand? The other day I was eyeing up a potential shot but the situation was flawed there was a big gas tank set off to one side and it clashed with the stone walls and tree's that I wanted to photograph, I realised if I moved to one side I could make that tank disappear behind a large tree, unfortunately that angle revealed another tank on the opposite side... someone needs to plant a tree :)

I suppose I could of taken the shot and erased the offending tank in post. Why does it offend , because this location has been here for 100's of years and it detracts from the location and it's not what I want to show.

We make choices of what we photograph and how we photograph it all the time. If you have a significant other don't you try to take their photo in a complimentary way, in the way that you see them and not in a way that makes them feel bad about themselves.

It's not all about beauty , sometimes you want to show the ugly too and this year has introduced a new ugly the discarded mask, the selfishness, the lack of respect and care for others that shows... but I am going of topic.

My point is that we take, make photos that ideally represent what we want people to see and not reality.

If you can accept that we are and our devices are imperfect then we come to the subject of processing. Generally our cameras automatically process the light we capture into an image which we call a photograph and I don't think there is one that has just a single option for how that image is processed. Even a raw file when we first see it usually has some processing applied for example white balance. Even in processing film we generally had pot luck as to how are images were developed.

Is it just me that finds people who profess a preference for straight out of camera images are letting an algorithm automatically process their image. Yet seem to think its less pure to take an active role in the final image. I guess they are going to love self driving cars :)

Actually to be fair, having a machine drive can be preferable to being a passenger driven by some people...

Personally I prefer to post process to some degree and that can be for a result closer to my vision of reality or maybe my vision of reality as I wish it was. The machines are quite good but somethings may be characteristic of a lens in a particular situation, purple fringing and chromatic aberration were not part of the original scene so it makes sense to correct for them but that's just my opinion.

Some post processing is just disturbing, if you take something like a sky replacement it should at least have a similar direction of light and the sky obviously affects what you see on the ground. I think it's actually quite hard to do well without the photo looking a bit off but that's really down to skill and judgement of the person doing the processing. I guess that's more where the school of thought of SOOC comes from because a lot of photos get "enhanced" badly.

Phew that's a lot of writing just to say photos are an imperfect capture of reality, so you really are free to change that capture.

I think the OP is right there often is more talk about gear rather than how to use that gear to best effect on here.

There are some discussions on technique but they are fairly widely dispersed across the boards sections. Pro's have some well worn formulas that they use regularly to obtain pleasing results that their clients will be happy with and some are happy to share them.

The problem with a word like technique it's a very broad brush, and probably why I just spent the last few paragraphs hammering out that photography is an interpretation of reality that you can bend to your own vision (or just let robots take care of).

Now we have that established that as the photographer you are free to do as you want, you need to figure out what you want to do and you will get techniques and methods once you say what you are aiming for. It really is up to people to start the conversation and after what 21 pages it's clear people want to talk.