Spring has a smell. The formula presents itself when the faint smell of cherry blossoms mixes with fresh rain. You can smell the dew. 

Photo development has a smell. The formula presents itself as a cross between dust, must, photo chemicals, and the curious scent of creativity. 48 hours after investigating the “new stuff” in Vegas, I entertained the “old stuff” too, exploring the rows of vintage camera vendors at Photographica in Newton, Massachusetts. After six days of capturing NAB Show with a Canon FD, here I was for six hours in deep and happy scouring of bins of lenses and cameras. In the corner, an 1800s wet plate system offered smells to mix in with the spring air. 

Vegas has a smell. The formula presents itself. It is a unique combination of air conditioning and 60 years of cigarettes caked into the carpet. The distinctive aura (is that the right word?), enhanced with smoke, hairspray, and perfume, wafts into the Westgate hotel lobby as guests take photos with the bronze statue of Elvis. “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?” welcomes cars in the driveway. Mostly, what I feel is cold.

Bronze is a metal alloy, and according to Mead Metals, an alloy is “a substance formed by mixing a metal with one or more other elements to enhance its properties.” This resulting mixture is usually stronger and more durable than before. 

When legacy is intertwined in NAB, we get something wholly different, wildly unique, and arguably stronger. With vintage lenses, mini cameras, homages to film stocks, and grand returns, the entire show floor is stronger when mixed with nostalgia and legacy. 

This is the beauty of applying vintage glass to a modern system. It sees modern things in new ways, but quickly and immediately through a digital form with added character. The result is an alloy that is stronger than before. Because “the old that is strong does not wither” (J.R.R. Tolkien).

I bring a bit of nostalgia to the show floor: a borrowed Canon 50mm f/1.8 FD mounted on a Sony a6700. It’s a little quirky to view the world through someone else’s lens; it carries the stories from before (but hopefully not the fungus or oddities, more on that later) into the current stream. The approach does not go unrecognized.

“Is that a Canon FD?” I’m asked while I take photos of patrons in Apple Vision Pros at the Blackmagic Design booth. Meant to showcase Blackmagic’s offerings that can be seen through an immersive device (like the Blackmagic Design URSA Cine Immersive Camera pictured below), I couldn’t help but chuckle at the ways glass is used here, both in mine as a remnant of the past and built into the Vision Pro as a curved front. Both mine and the Vision Pro’s are covered in plastic for protection. Creatives like to keep beloved things safe. (“My precious.”)

And then, floating in like the ash on Mordor, I hear it. The distinctive notes swaying in on the backs of bokeh, disrupting camera research from far away: I‘m gonna show you…how it’s done, done, done. The K-Pop Demon Hunters are here… well… more specifically, at the AVID booth just across the walkway from Blackmagic. This year, AVID was a rotating door of Oscar winners and Oscar hopefuls, from the K-Pop Demon Hunters editors to the sound designer for Project Hail Mary. When you bring the editors of the moment, you can expect to be Golden. And you “better sit down for the show,” because every single session at AVID was packed, with visitors sitting wherever they could find room on the carpet. Oscars, by the way, are also made of bronze. Yet another alloy, awarded to the best in film.

Flecks of gold stand out among the rest. When you find something shiny and special, you dive in. Like K-Pop Demon Hunters, elements and alloys can be memorable, different, catchy. And unexpected. 

And then I run smack into an element that is memorable, different, and unexpected.

When I arrive at the GoPro booth, Christopher Prado, Senior Manager for PR, Influencing and Sports Marketing at GoPro, and his colleagues are carrying….is that a GoPro being worn crossbody like an X100V? Beautiful saturated and cinematic footage beckons me in as I rectify the content I’m seeing, the wearing of the cameras as a fashion accessory and… are those lenses mounted on a GoPro? Where am I? We’re not in Kansas anymore (but Dorothy might be, at The Sphere). I can mount lenses on a GoPro while shooting 4K 240FPS? I can shoot 8K? I can shoot Open Gate on a device the size of my MacBook Pro charger?

“You could probably put that on,” Jon Thorn, Director of Product Management for Cameras at GoPro, offers, pointing to my Canon FD. 

The fashion accessory and golden element? The new GoPro MISSION 1 Pro ILS, one of the new MISSION line cameras from GoPro that allows the user to mount glass. With an MFT mount, not only are MFT lenses fully covered, but vintage lenses can be mounted too. Plus one for nostalgia. 

“First thing to say, since it’s a one-inch sensor, micro four thirds lenses that are native will all cover the sensor for sure,” Thorn explained. He noted that due to the short focal flange distance, you can pop on a variety of glass. “So you can run vintage glass like your Canon FD, you could run old Nikon stuff, you could run old Minolta stuff…These are all possibilities. So you can literally for twenty to thirty bucks a pop, get every adapter known to mankind and just go crazy, right? Because that to me is not about the sensor. That’s about the flexibility. The lens mount combined with the sensor gives you, which opens up the doors for really small handheld cinema verité shooting. Or you could go full cinema and put big cinema zooms on with fiz motors and like, do whatever you want.”

The change is driven by the customer experience: why choose the lens for the user when they could build a camera that allows the user to choose the lens?

“Make it as universal as possible,” Thorn shared. “You want to stay creative.”

We chat about the funkiness of lenses, particularly of a Russian variety. Some might have decay in them. Something like a Helios? ”Well real old stuff,” Thorn joked. “Jupiter?” I offered. There’s something to be traded on the show floor when you speak someone’s lens language. A shared camaraderie. The Fellowship of the Manual Focus Ring.

“We live in a world where things are almost too clean,” Thorn continued. “But how cool is it to shoot it in the moment? Because then you’re crafting. You’re not toying around.”

The booth showcased the ability to put any lens on the GoPro. Broadcast lens? Why not. Vintage lens? Sure. While the MISSION 1 Pro ILS was on the floor at NAB Show, there are still a few elements that need to be updated before release, such as focus peaking and magnification. 

So when can we expect the golden headturner, offering 8K Open Gate, 50MP photos, and an MFT Mount? The Mission 1 and the Mission 1 Pro can be reserved. The Mission 1 Pro ILS (which allows for interchangeable lenses) still has a “Notify Me” button on the site and says it will be offered at $699.

NAB is data-driven, of course. Social media metrics. Viewers. Purchases. Sales. Tokens. Generations. Attendees. But the true measurement? Chatter. It’s like the Sundance Film Festival. Yes, success is measured in the sale of a film, but also in how many times the film is mentioned on a bus rumbling through Park City. And at every turn at NAB, I heard the same question: Did you see the GoPro with mounted lenses? At an event where success is measured in mentions, GoPro had a good show. When I returned to Boston University, a colleague wasted no time in finding me to ask: Have you seen this thing?

After the GoPro Mission 1 Pro ILS, the next cameras with the most chatter were the new Insta360 Luna (hidden behind a frosted glass case) and mini 12MP camera keychain given out as special secret swag by Aputure/Amaran. Legacy can survive in the smallest forms, and it can have great impact. As we swam in the bokeh created by the NiSi Athena Rewind, itself an homage to vintage glass of yore, everyone at the booth instead gawked at the tiny keychain, itself an homage to the cameras of yore but in miniature form. The NiSi booth shared Athena as “one lens – two personalities.” Again, I guess two things together are better than one. “Stop screwing around” pleaded NiSi’s t-shirts, requesting that we update to magnetic lens filters. 

In this case, smaller might be better, including a Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD pin, almost cute enough to make you forget the one that might have died on you in 2023. While passing out adorable stickers and fanny packs, Sandisk unveiled three new media cards, including a new Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-II 90 card that can support 8K video with 2 TB capacity and a 4 TB capacity CFexpress card.  

The other way to measure the success of a camera is by the sheer number of them. And everywhere I looked, there was a DJI Pocket in everyone’s pocket. Every other person on the show floor captured the happenings with their small toothbrush-sized camera. They should consider themselves lucky, considering the increased price and the inability to purchase the new DJI Pocket camera, which was on display on the show floor, but not yet available in the United States. 

For someone carrying a Canon FD over their shoulder like an X100VI, or any other vintage lens on the floor, moments and sparks have their own character. They pop. They’re funky. They see the show floor in a new way. While lenses can bring that approach through glass, there are other ways to highlight a change. And some aren’t even on the show floor at all, but before the security guards allow you to pass (Gandalf, anyone?).

“Not all those who wander are lost” (Thank you, Tolkien), but if you did, you might stumble across something that adds to your journey. You might find pro-wrestlers at Panasonic as they celebrate 25 years of LUMIX. You might stumble across something that stops you in your hobbit tracks and causes you to dance. An antique-looking camera with decades-influenced looks and film elements at the same booth as an IMAX®-Certified Digital Camera. Welcome to FUJIFILM, where we travel “there and back again,” not quite “a hobbit’s tale.”

But first, FUJIFILM Instax Mini Evo Cinema is the offending unit, if offending means I might be dancing along with alloys. It is, to put it bluntly, FUN. From decades views to 15 seconds of video to printable photos, I light up like the lights behind the camera. Rows and rows of cameras that cost thousands of dollars, and I am bewitched by a millennial/Gen-Z hybrid jewel for $410. The above photo of me is “from the 1980s.” Tubular.

While the Evo Cinema offers one example of the future and the past together, its most recent monster model does as well, albeit ready for the IMAX screen: the FUJIFILM GFX ETERNA 55 Cinema Camera. Offered for less than $20,000, John Blackwood, Director of Brand and Product Marketing for FUJIFILM North America, highlighted the “accessibility aspect” of the Eterna alongside the 4:3 aspect ratio (for Open Gate recording), which is a “legacy aspect ratio in filmmaking.” And of course, the beloved FUJIFILM colors. Not to be confused with the color and shutter drag below, which I felt inspired to test in the FUJIFILM booth, where fresh flowers were delivered every day. If evil stinks (a la Tolkien’s Orcs), then creativity must be in bloom.

“Color is a part of our legacy,” Blackwood shared. “It’s a part of our soul. We have a variety of film simulations available directly in camera. We also have a variety of 3D Film Simulation LUTs that we’ve developed …Some of them are directly mapped from the analog film that we’ve sold over the years. And some of them are inspired by filmic looks.” The name itself, Eterna, comes from a popular cinematic film stock discontinued in 2013. But of course, it is one of the simulations available in camera.

As I inquire about the love of FUJIFILM and their loyal fans, many of whom I see carrying their X100 models on their shoulders, he pulls out his own as I asked the question. There’s lots of pride in this booth.

“One of the many things that we’re really proud of at FUJIFILM is really our legacy,” Blackwood shared. “These digital cameras that we’re coming out with today are a natural extension and embrace of that legacy. Everything we do with those digital cameras at their core starts with that same passion and dedication to imaging….We really intentionally think about how each camera is built for a specific user and the experience they want.”

Guess they thought about me dancing at the Evo then.

There will be endless debates about whether NAB Show and Las Vegas as a whole will ever be the same as before the lockdown. Before hotels were considered as emergency housing. Before we all had to submit our vaccination status to attend. When I first attended NAB in 2016, the DJI Osmo had just been released. There was probably chatter (I wasn’t focused on coverage at the time). There are still people I see regularly every year. 

After ten years, some things are the same. Some things are different. And some things make a surprise return: It’s time for Vegas. The video editing software. Not the city.

Vegas has had quite the quest. Like the ring, it has passed from hand to hand. Vegas by Sonic Foundry. Sony Vegas. Magix Vegas Pro.

And now we can add three more names to that list (I see you, Aragorn). Vegas Pro… by Boris FX, available in three flavors: Vegas Pro, Vegas Pro Plus, and Vegas Pro Ultimate. Each tier of the new Vegas offerings comes with a variety of the Borix FX plugins, applications, and possibilities.

I sat down with Boris Yamnitsky (Founder of Boris FX), Brian Fox (Chief Marketing Officer at Boris FX), Ben Brownlee (Director of Content at Boris FX), and Nick Rodrigues (Chief Sales & Strategy Officer at Boris FX) for a walkthrough of the new/old/revamped/resuscitated Vegas. It’s a legacy system, but that’s part of its appeal. It’s a name that’s been around.

“It‘s almost like there’s a soul of VEGAS, right?” Brian Fox explained. “And we’re definitely not going to change that. There’s a reason why Vegas does things a little bit differently than some of the other apps. And that’s why people love it. That’s why people use it a ton. We’re not looking to change all that in many ways. We want to lean into that, make it even more.”

For those looking to edit their legacies, i.e. investigate prior versions of their projects, Vegas may feel a bit different: there is only one timeline per project, but, you can take a project and place it inside another one. And as a reminder, Vegas Pro is only available for PCs (Microsoft Windows). A full Boris breakdown will be available alongside an AI in video editing recap from NAB.

Over the course of NAB, itself a vestige of broadcasting’s past, the show floor has morphed into an alloy of past time and present innovations. Like the swords in Lord of the Rings, an alloy of sorts that proves symbolic. Maybe there is room for steel at play. 

There is at Photographica. 

While on the floor of a different kind (a linoleum cafeteria at Nerton North High School, to be exact), I trade a semi-functional ISCO Goettingen lens for a Canon FD stuck open at F1.4. “A broken lens for a broken lens,” the vendor joked. 

I ponder this feeling of being more open. Accepting more joy through a trade between strangers who somehow now know each other. The Fellowship of the Manual Focus Ring now betting on each other (and yes, because it’s Vegas, I will use that world). Betting on new equipment. After six days with an FD on the show floor, and six hours with a new one, I know something broken wide is open for me: Bet on yourself. 

Here in Boston, we have a new team with a name that references history: The Boston Legacy. And, here, I have the luxury of fixing a new alloy of sorts: a MacBook Pro in space gray, purchased midway through the creation of this article. Turns out we don’t just swap lenses, we swap computers.

When we investigate technology, whether it be laptops or cameras or lenses, we want flourishes of whimsy and character. These are the things we talk about. These are what make stories, our personal alloys, better and stronger. These are the things we live for. And as long as we continue to seek them, we will have a legacy. It’s like Gandalf said: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”