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).
19 Responses
Amazing!
Magick
Crap load of micro four third quality when it can’t even use full frame of the sensor!
That would definitely be easier to do with ultimate mega ultra full frame sensor camera that really use whole sensor!
The micro four third didn’t make this easier or possible, the true talent comes only from using perfect camera that fits to job. In this case GH4.
(if someone didn’t get sarcasm, go out).
nice
Wonderful and interesting pictures. Camera is irrelevant.
As pots to a Chef. 😉
Hope such shows inspire young people to get interested. Nicely done! 🙂
Inspiring like Berenice Abbott (her physics photography from the 1960’s).
Thats really cool! Wonder how they lit this. Slowing down time or speeding up reality always makes things nicer though;)
Not always. Most of times it is boring and dull effect as it is overdone effect way too often. It is now like everyone wants to use it because “always makes things nicer though”. (Yes, your 😉 is noted).
It belongs to one of the basic mistakes in video editing, using too many transition effects, trying to capture everything in “S-log” mode (the color grading was done because different chemicals and films had different color on film era, to get them look same) or now slowing or speeding up. Even using once speed change trick can make video very dull.
Thanks for that lesson, world famous videographer Juurikas. Now screw off.
Haha. Poor guy. I bet he waited 40 years just to share his wisdom.
Walter Heisenberg is back !
Nice video by the way
Arrr, mates.
If ye’ saw Silver in a Video would ye’ even recognize her.
Fancy
A very nice video made with a great 4K camera!
The Zuiko 60mm can get similar images? This can be made with a microscope.
Yan Liang and his own creativity what he can do is pretty ideal. The idea, as well as the content shown is a fairly clear.
Wow!! These are spectacular!