Cool old photo lenses die hard

Whoa there! This page is in dire need of some updating. At that, I will plug my favorite new site: kenrockwell.com. Everything you could ever want to know about photography and cameras. Every page is full of useful insights such as "the FE has real knobs so you can change settings like a man." Hahaha I love it! He was referring to the old Nikon film camera that I just bought along with some slick lenses that I can mount on the 7D for shooting video.

One awesome conceptual breakthrough I made is understanding that the Canon 7D's frame (22.3mm x 14.9mm) isn't even close to "full-frame" 35mm (36mm x 24mm), as the 5D and Nikon D3 approximate. But luckily for us movie people, the 7D's chip size is so close to a Super-35mm movie film frame (24.9mm x 13.9mm) that it's not even funny. Think about old film cameras. You run the film through sideways, producing an image like the full frame of this film cutout:

(I pulled this image from here.)The blue square represents what you see on a 7D, at 1.6x crop. Now think about movie cameras. Film generally runs through the gate vertically, effectively a 1.5x crop from full-frame 35mm. Check out how the 7D aligns:

Holy crap! Cool, huh?

I realize that equipment doesn't define a cameraman, but I can't wait to screw around with my new stuff! For the record, I'm not a wild fan of DSLR filmmaking. It just gets weird. In my fantasies I'm shooting everything with Alexa and all of my footage looks like it came from IMAX. But those are fantasies, and the 7D is still the best deal for us hipster guerrillas.