I did a few brief shots on Christmas Day but today I took the Letus mini and the Canon HV20 out to Richmond park to see how I would get on.

I sorted out the issue with controlling aperture before I left, (how fiddly is that?), took my Marshall monitor with component connection as there is no way you can tell focus on the crappy little LCD screen, my Miller Solo DS20 tripod and 2 lenses. My Zeiss T2 50mm macro and the Sigma 20mm f1.8 (which in the end I used only once).

I didn't have any rod support, which was a mistake, something I will talk about later. So it was all a bit precarious.

You are not supposed to film in Richmond Park without a permit as it is a Royal Park. But the camera is little, the tripod isn't that big and I tried to keep away from the roads where the Parks police patrol!

I went to King Henry's Mound. A great little place. It's a raised point near Pembroke lodge with a telescope that has an amazing view over the South West but even better, point the other way through the bushes and you see a perfectly framed view across London with St Paul's Cathedral dead centre. Nobody is allowed to build in that line of site by Royal Decree. So few people know about it but if you are ever in Richmond, go see it. It's near Richmond Gate and Pembroke Lodge.

Unfortunately with no lens longer than 50mm on me (I would need around a 2000mm to see the above view!) you can't see what people are looking at at the beginning of the short! Well that's it above! If I had my 20 x canon lens with 2x extender on my F350 i could get pretty damn close!!!

The first problem i had was it's fiddly! Compared to using the EX1 it was like knitting with boxing gloves on. But the monitor helped, the advice from others about how to control aperture helped. But I really missed proper manual control.

I was blown away by how sharp the image was. Incredible edge to edge sharpness. WAY better than my extreme and EX1. This appears to be an issue with the EX1 with close focus. It affects both the Extreme and the Brevis. It is fixable, it just needs something to compensate for the spherical aberration.

When I got the sharpness spot on (only achievable with an external monitor) there is no way you would believe this image was coming from a £500 camera, albeit with a $1100 adaptor and $700 bit of glass in front.

I wanted to carry on for another couple of hours but I was having trouble with my Nikon mount. It was slightly loose. Annoying as I knew it was and I had a replacement sent to me by Hien, I just forgot it! It got progressively more and more loose to the point where the Letus vibration was making the image wobble amazingly. So it was time to stop. I had 30 minutes of vision on the tape.

Overall this camera is superb for the money, there is nothing that can touch it! Sure, if you have another 4 grand get an ex1 but combined with the Letus Mini, an affordable LCD monitor for focusing...AND ESSENTIAL THIS, get it rod mounted the lens thread cannot take the weight of the adaptor and anything but the lightest lens. This is what caused most of my problems. There was so much bend going on I had to stop and go home. Shame, it was a beautiful day and I really wanted to carry on. Oh well, next time (which will probably be with my EX1)!

Enjoy the little short, no story, just pretty pics!! The music has a couple of glitches. I need to fix that and put it back up clean!

Right click and save to download 720p version