Some things involving esoteric and expensive gear we do because they help us bring our creative visions to fruition or enable new technical capabilities that can improve the quality or efficiency of our work. Some things we do just because we can. This video is about the latter.
Coming to you from MAKE. ART. NOW., this fun video follows them as they put a Sony FE 400mm f/2.8 GM OSS lens on a gimbal and shoot video with it. The 400mm f/2.8 is a huge lens with an equally gigantic price ($12,000), normally used almost exclusively by sports, wildlife, and bird photographers who need the combination of an extra-long focal length with an extreme aperture to be able to maintain fast shutter speeds and subject-isolating depth of field from very long distances. But if you have the chance to throw it on a gimbal and shoot some video with it, why not try it out? That extreme combination of focal length and aperture along with the lens' top-notch image quality enable some very unique shots, and while I doubt there are many people out there who are going to drop five figures worth of cash just for those few moments, it is fun to see what kind of creative things you can do when given the chance. Check out the video above to see what they got!
I tried to watch this video when it was posted a few days ago. Unfortunately there's so much nonsense going on (fake computer assistant, B-roll/blog content, movie clips) that after a short time scrubbing through to see the actual footage I just turned it off.