(classical piano music)
- So, I love to do review videos,
and when I do those I like to make sure
that I know what I'm talking about.
I spend a lot of time with the product,
I understand the pros and the cons
and who it might be good for,
and I give the best, most detailed information that I can.
Today, I'm not really gonna do any of that
'cause I thought it would be more fun.
The thing that I have in here
is kinda strange and different,
and I thought that together, we'd just figure it out.
So I got this giant case right here.
And in this case, I haven't used this yet,
I've got something pretty different.
This thing right here.
The, I honestly don't know what brand this is.
This is the brand, and I don't know what that says,
but it's a probe lens, and that is the worst name
that I can think of for a lens, but here's some cool things.
So, the reason it came in this giant Pelican case right here
is because I actually rented this lens,
and this video's not sponsored or anything,
but I rented it from lensrentals.com.
And the reason I rented this is because it's a lens
that I've been really curious about playing around with,
and it sells for about $1500,
which in the world of lenses, isn't really extreme.
But for me, it's way out of my budget,
especially for something that's such a niche specialty item
that even at work where we have a bit of a bigger budget,
I couldn't justify buying something like this,
at least not yet, without experimenting with it.
And so, renting it, it was like $100 for a week,
and now I can play around with it and figure it out.
So, you might have seen these around.
These are kind of amazing, despite their terrible name.
One of the crazy things about this lens though
is that it's widest aperture is F14,
so we're gonna kinda talk about that in a second.
It's got this little lens cap right here,
and then there are a bunch of little LED lights
around the lens element itself.
I got the Canon version of this lens
so it just has an EF mount.
I think that this is a fully manual lens.
Look how insane this looks.
It's like a weapon.
Oh yeah, so this is a fully manual lens, basically.
When I turn on my camera,
it tells me that there's not a lens attached,
but if I press the record button then the lens opens up,
and I can control the aperture and all the other settings.
Now, this is a 24 millimeter lens.
So I'm filming with a 24 millimeter lens,
and this is a 24 millimeter lens,
why don't they do the same thing?
Well, my Sigma lens is just sort of a normal lens,
it is this big, I guess, the lens element, 77 millimeters.
This is, I dunno, a couple of millimeters.
And basically, it gives you
an entirely different perspective.
And the reason this fully manual lens needs a USB cable
is because it does have those LED lights,
so I think I just plug this in right here,
and then I plug this into a power bank.
Oh, look at that.
And then the front of the lens has those LEDs.
So, the first thing, since we need a lot of light,
I'm just gonna go outside
and see how this looks in the grass, in the plants,
and just all the things that are outside in the yard
that you normally never pay attention to.
(jazzy music)
So this probe lens comes in a Canon EF mount,
or you can also get the Nikon F mount,
or even a Pentax K mount.
And even though it is 24 millimeters
which is a relatively wide focal length,
it is designed for closeup shooting,
which is really kind of a cool thing
that gets you a point of view you normally never get.
And clearly, it is also something
that is designed for a studio setting,
where you have full control over lighting
and arrangement of subjects, but in that environment,
it really shines, especially for product photography.
So, playing with this lens outside,
there were a few things I noticed.
One is 24 millimeters is still pretty dang wide,
so if I hold it just like a normal camera,
it almost looks like a fisheye lens.
It doesn't really look that different,
it's just how close you can get to everything.
And because it is relatively wide,
especially on a full frame sensor,
it's actually pretty easy to hold steady.
However, I decided I wanted it to be even steadier,
so I put it on my motorized slider
to make sure the moves were steady as possible.
And even then, what I noticed is,
when this was on the slider,
if there's just a little bit of movement,
because the lens is so long,
if it kind of bounces or jiggles, that does show up.
So, it's not the end of the world,
but it just means it's something to be aware of
if you're filming with a lens like this.
The next thing I noticed is that it didn't work on my EOS R,
and I feel like there's a way around it.
It seems like it has something to do with the fact
that it's a fully manual lens.
It shows up like a picture on the camera,
but when you press record, nothing will happen,
so I've been using it on the 6D Mark II,
where it works fine.
I'm not sure what's up with the R,
I'm gonna play around with that a little bit more,
and then hopefully figure out a solution,
'cause I would love to just have those higher bit rates
and better low light performance on this lens
since it needs so much light to work.
But one of the main things
that I wanted to do with this lens
was do some product shots.
And one of the things that might help
is this super bright box right here.
This is actually an inexpensive little backdrop photo thing
that I got off Amazon.
You can see, it's so bright
that right now it's completely blown out.
There's a little blue backdrop in here.
But I figured that would be enough light
to start playing around with
and get some really cool product shots.
So, there's clearly
a bit of a learning curve with this lens.
I will say, the build quality on this thing
is absolutely outstanding.
It's all metal mounts.
The aperture ring and the focus ring
feel really, really good.
The whole thing is made out of metal and glass,
and I mean, it's definitely an incredibly high quality lens
that is very, very specialized.
So, I'm going to experiment more with this
over the next week.
I'm gonna use it in a few upcoming videos,
so you'll see if you can spot it
in those shots in future videos.
And ultimately, I kinda just wanted to take you along
as I experimented with this thing
and try to figure out how to use it,
definitely a learning curve.
My favorite shot that I got today
was actually with the record player.
And actually a shot that was in my head
when I ordered this lens,
is I wanted to come down over the record, and by the needle,
and everything just kinda looked big and massive,
and that was a really fun shot.
So, as someone who does a lot of
tabletop product photography,
I'm really excited to experiment with this
and do some really cool, different stuff with it
over the next week.