Yan Liang made one of the most intriguing works I have seen this year. He uses the Panasonic GH4 to take those unique shots of chemical reactions. He was so kind to share images and a short report to 43rumors.
P.S.: Please do not use these images without permission from Yan :)
This is his original article for 43rumors:
Beautiful Chemical Reactions from L2 Molecule on Vimeo.
Shooting Beautiful Chemical Reactions in 4K with Panasonic GH4
Beautiful Chemistry is a project collaboration between the Institute of Advanced Technology at the University of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University Press. The goal of this project is to bring the beauty of chemistry to the general public through digital media and technology.
Shooting chemical reactions with a new perspective is the essential part of this project. Right at the beginning, we wanted to shoot in 4K resolution to capture the amazing details of chemical reactions like never before. Selecting Panasonic GH4 was a no-brainer for us for 3 reasons. First, great GH4 reviews just came out before we made the purchase. We got a lot of useful information about GH4 from 43rumors, many thanks! Second, because we shot at close distance with macro lenses, we wanted the depth of field to be as large as possible. The micro 4/3 format is perfect for our task. Third, the cost of GH4 was very reasonable compared to other alternatives.
The lens we used most was a Tokina 100mm f/2.8 macro. The lens is optically excellent and comes with a handy aperture ring. For most of our footages, we shot at f/16 to maximize the DOF. In addition, the reproduction ratio was typically between 1:1 to 1:1.5.
We used an 8-core Mac Pro and Final Cut Pro X to edit the 4K footages shot with GH4. The footage file size out of GH4 is quite reasonable. However, for smooth editing in FCP X, we transcoded all footages to ProRes 422 and the file size became about 6 times larger. To solve this problem, we bought an external RAID system to store the transcoded media for efficient editing.
Finally, as mentioned by many GH4 users, still frames from 4K video footages can be used as 8-megapixel photos. Many still images in this post were taken from our 4K footages.
To learn more about these reactions, please visit Beautiful Chemistry website at:
http://beautifulchemistry.net
Images from Yan Liang (Click on it to enlarge):
These are all such beautiful images!!! Thanks Yan!
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GH4 North American store links:
GH4 camera at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto, Ritz Camera and Panasonic. Price: $1,698. In Canada at Vistek.
GH4 camera with interface unit at Adorama and BHphoto. Price: $3,298
Interface unit only at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto and Panasonic. Price: $1,998
GH4 Europen store links:
Germany: Wexcameras, Marcotec-shop.de.
UK at Wexphotographic, CameraWorld, UKdigital, CVP, TipTop.
Holland at Fotohanskeuzekamp.
Belgium at Fotokonijnenberg.
Norway at Fotovideo.
Sweden at Cyberphoto, Skandinavianphoto.
Finland at Telefoto, Topshot, Verkkoauppa.
France at Photocineshop.
Spain: Fotoboom.
Asian store links:
Digitalrev and Digidirect Australia.
4K cards
Kingston 16-32-64 GB SDHC UHS-I Speed Class 3 at Amazon (Click here), Adorama (Click here) and BHphoto (Click here).
Sandisk 16-32-64 GB Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-II Memory Card at Amazon (Click here), Adorama (Click here) and BHphoto (Click here).
Transcend 64-128 GB High Speed 10 UHS-3 at Amazon (Click here) and BHphoto (Click here).
Panasonic 16-32-64 GB SDHC-UHS-I U3 Card (90MB/s) at Adorama (Click here) and BHphoto (Click here).