Feels like we might have a lot of smart cinema people here that could help me.
My goal is to get as much magnification as possible with most object in focus.
That’s why I’m considering wide macro lenses - and to block less light was looking into probes.
I do not have any rentals nearby to try them out my self unfortunately.
Lenses I’m considering:
Laowa Probe Zoom (15-35mm T12) - More magnification would be extremely useful for me.
Laowa Probe Zoom (15-24mm T8) - I guess we’re shooting slo motion? But loosing extra punch.
Loawa has 0.7x Focal Reducer for Probe Lens - this could work well on S35 Spark to give more light.
Alternatively I was looking into DZO film x-tract-probe-zoom
Any experiences and recommendations would be very helpful!
Greetings from far ;)
Laowa put on a lens demo in conjunction with the CSC last week, and included a zoom probe lens. Their probe lenses are very nice, and I think a good solution for getting close to a subject without blocking much light from it.
I’m probably going to get one of those sooner or later, though in the interim I have an old Canon mpx65 lens. One advantage of the probe lens is that its length is fixed, unlike the mpx65, making it easier to get it into position and adjust magnification.
When testing I used the Laowa T8 along with their 0.7 focal reducer (AKA Speed Booster).
I ran an Aputure 600D bare bulb as key and then a 300D with fresnel as backlight.
Unfortunately there wasn’t enough light to stop down for a deeper depth of field so I stuck with T8.
You’re going to need a ton of light if you want to shoot 1000fps+ with a T8 lens.
For my test - more light would have killed the bugs, it was warming the stick up a lot.
You can see some shots here (links updated - dropbox had some issues yesterday):
Mantis Strike
Jumping Spider
Cheers for that!
How far did you had your lights? For such macro shots you can have exponentially more illuminance if you would place lights closer to the subject.
P.s. dropbox files do not open - but would love to check the footage 
What is your general take on this lense? would you? should you? Or should I? I do shoot random experiments where often I do find the need for macro close ups…
I just fixed the links. The forum was breaking the links because it misinterprets the and symbol in links (&). Fixed now.
I had my lights relatively close (inside 1meter) but as I said - heat was the challenge when dealing with the insects, it would smoke them if I went closer haha.
Thanks for updated clip links!
It’s interesting that you had focus peaking on your monitor, but praying mantis does look out of focus, while the fly is more in focus.
This shows that filming moving subjects might be extremely difficult at higher fps especially when you need to stop down the aperture.
I guess I’ll wait for my Spark to arrive and first test it on Sony 100mm macro lense before considering buying the probe 
Cheers a lot!