Fast T1.4 Leica Summilux-C 21mm prime lens on a Canon EOS 7D modified for PL mount by BandPro Film & Digital.
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All photos by D.W. Leitner

Shrinking in the rearview mirror like a signpost whizzing past at 80 mph, April’s NAB pointed to no less than four approaching upheavals in production technology. You had to have your polarized glasses on backwards at NAB not to see evidence of them everywhere. For those unable or unwilling to attend NAB, I’ll attempt a recap in my next columns.

These four areas of advancement involve not digital compression or recording but first principles of photography and sight itself: the light that falls on a subject, the lens that captures that light, the sensor that registers the image, the binocular experience of spatial depth.

Racing towards mainstream use, for example, LED production lighting is not only cool-running and energy-efficient but durable, lightweight, and compact. Much of it carry-on size in an era of airline luggage-charge gouging.

I’ll devote an entire column to LED lighting, at NAB and beyond, but for now suffice it to say, with the advent of innovative LED fresnels from industry leaders Litepanels and Gekko, LEDs are red hot (so to speak). Hot enough for Chinese manufacturers to festoon their NAB booths with shameless rip-offs of Litepanels 1×1 luminaires… but I’m getting ahead of myself. more