Lenses 101!? 28mm, 100mm? M2 35mm lens converter questions.

[Todd Terry]

Actually….

I applaud Clint’s enthusiasm… I myself never intended to pick on him, and hope I wasn’t perceived as such. I generally try to be very helpful…

In fact, I probably wouldn’t have responded at all, except that the dropped the F-bomb. F as in FEATURE. As in, “I don’t know one end of a lens from another but I’m going to go out and shoot a FEATURE now because I’m in a big hurry and I don’t have time to learn anything about it but it’s alrght because I’m really excited and that makes it ok.”

There is nothing wrong with learning-by-doing… we all do that. But a FEATURE is probably not the best place for it. They are just too hard. There’s too much going on. Too many things to think about. He needs to get his new camera, go out an play with it a while… shoot some neighborhood kids doing a skit. Make a couple of shorts. Goof around and learn it. But don’t try to shoot a feature film 10 minutes after you take the bubble wrap off the first camera you’ve ever shot with. It’s just not a good recipe.

Why am I semi passionate about this? Because I used to be Clint. I was a young, eager, very ethusiastic guy… I thought I knew a lot about film and set out to make a feature. I’d never owned a camera before. People considered me a wunderkind, but actually I didn’t really know the difference in a 28mm and a 100mm either. It got me a lot though… it got me about 10,000 feet of crap negative and a film that was never finished.

Looking back 20 years, I wish I had somebody who knew what they were doing to say “Hey son, slow down just a little… learn at least a little bit first, maybe make a short first thing out of the gate.” I didn’t even have the COW to tell me those things back then. There’s nothing wrong with walking out of the kiddie pool and diving into the deep end I suppose, but in hindsight sometimes you might wish there had been a fatherly lifeguard who at least said “Ummm, hey kid can you swim?”

But again, I applaud Clint’s enthusiasm.

ALSO… Tim made some great points. He posted in the right forums. He was polite. He said THANK YOU. Sadly, that’s getting rare. There are a number of frequent posters on the COW (resisting the urge here to name 3 or 4 names) that I simply no longer answer, even if I have the perfect solution for their problem. Why? Because they never even acknowledge that you took time to try to help them. Five people might write five pages of responses, but you never hear a peep back out of the original poster. I don’t have to be “thanked” to death (or even at all), but even a simple “Hey, I’ll try that…” or a “Good idea, but won’t work in my case because…” is enough to let you know that your efforts to find them a solution was at least read and that you didn’t completely waste your time. Oh well, I’m beginning to sound like a crank here. I wonder if I should grab Wargo and Zelin and we all get matching jackets?

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Tim Wilson]

[Todd at Fantastic Plastic] “Oh well, I’m beginning to sound like a crank here. I wonder if I should grab Wargo and Zelin and we all get matching jackets?”

They’re a slimming shade of off-white, with long sleeves that lock in the back. One size fits all.

tim(at)creativecow(dot)net

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