OPINION
In a post-heavy industry, do in-camera optical effects still matter? Phil Rhodes argues that they do – now more than ever
long time ago, your narrator found himself at Panavision’s Woodland Hills facility, staring at an unassuming cylindrical object
People working on less well-funded productions have hoovered eBay clean of historic stills lenses with much the same goal. It has been a big deal for such a long time that finding reasonably priced options now typically demands hanging around back-alley lens dealers stocked with a wedge of used twenties. And even then, this is not a reliable route to finding lenses that give every pixel on a 6K sensor something to do. To an extent, that’s the point – given a moderate stop, such a lens might produce pictures that provoke chin-stroking approbation among connoisseurs while simultaneously satisfying distributors with a UHD mandate. On the other hand, the sort of production that’s most likely to seize enthusiastically on a lens found in a compost heap might also struggle to maintain that moderate stop, and interesting lenses often don’t look interesting at f/8 anyway. That’s when hard-to-fix fuzziness can creep in, which is why ZEISS (for instance) promotes the idea that the Radiance edition of its Supreme Primes aren’t simply interesting, but consistently interesting across all f-stops and focal lengths. Crucially, though, they might not be a financial option for the kinds of recent graduates who are challenged to put together a different look every week for projects such as music videos or short films.
marked ‘C40’ as if it were some sort of religious icon. The C series anamorphics are among the most storied lenses out there: this is the Blade Runner lens, the Close Encounters lens, the Jaws lens. They’re more or less the founding example of anamorphics that produce big blue horizontal flares. Back then, it took ten minutes to find an example C lens to photograph, even at this emporium of Panathings. Practically all of its siblings were out there satisfying the modern cinematographer’s need to impose an indelible influence on the image, in a world where filmmaking equipment is increasingly designed to defer every possible decision to the post-production process.
STRETCHING THE LIMITS The Synergy kit from Simmod contains frames and glass to create custom filters with any materials you have lying around
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