An example of what I find very useful with the Leica 24-90mm Vario Elmarit zoom lens.

 

Last year I did a video project for our classical radio station here in Austin; KMFA-FM. They had a visiting composer and we made a video about their new program dedicated to bringing in talented new composers, having them work in residence to produce new work. While we were between interviews in their concert hall I watched their in house sound engineer miking their grand piano of a live performance. 

I walked around a looked at the orientation of the mic to the piano strings and immediately wanted to make a photo. I had the Leica SL2 set up with the zoom on it and I used it handheld, depending on the image stabilization in the body and on the lens. The shot was done at f4.0 which is wide open at the longer focal lengths and so was stopped down just a bit for these images. I especially love the way the focus falls off in the top photograph. It's just exactly what I wanted but I didn't know I wanted that effect until I saw it on the camera screen. 

The mic is quite sharp while the background just fades away. That's the benefit of having a zoom lens that's highly corrected for wide open aperture operation. Not all lenses can do both a sharp, close up at a wide open aperture and fun bokeh in the background. 

Shots like these can be really nice "b-roll" when you get down to editing the video. Not everything has to move...