Carl Zeiss Joins the Team

Anyone who knows me knows that I love good tools. Polished bronze hand planes from Maine, razor sharp Japanese kitchen knives, and most recently: handmade bamboo fly rods from a rod maker in Kentucky I was lucky enough to connect with. I love them all equally; perhaps to the chagrin of my darling wife who is kind enough to show interest in my fastidious obsessions while also tolerating their expense.

I particularly love good tools when they are singular in nature; designed for one purpose and one purpose only - performing their job with such excellence and such precision as to be unmatched in their design. Enter three Carl Zeiss Compact Cinema Primes in 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm focal lengths.

There isn’t a single microchip, servo, or braided wire in them. They don’t zoom and they won’t help a camera detect faces. They are as pure as pure gets: glass, metal, and 175 years of research and development in the pursuit of optical beauty.

Modern still-photography lenses that are used in the capture of video offer their own conveniences: they’re fast, they can snap to auto-focus in a fraction of a second, and overall they look great - particularly the more expensive ones. On the other hand, using cinema primes that boast no special features forces the content creator to be intentional and calculated. It’s laborious, it’s inconvenient, and I love every second of it.

So, I’m excited to add them to the arsenal and take them out on the next capture. In the meantime, if anyone would like to come over for a meal we can throw some food on the gaucho grill. But you’ll have to help me split firewood to get it going first.