FEATURE | LENS SPEC I AL
RIGHT The Vintage Lens Co’s new re-housed Neo Super Baltar
dimensional than Super 35. I’m very excited to explore this new canvas.” Barry Bassett from rental company, VMI, admits his favourite lenses are the ones that sell well, which gives him a more rudimentary view but doesn’t stop him buying LF lenses – he has just invested in Fujinon Premista zooms. He explains: “Just in case large format explodes, we have to be ready. We are the first company to order Premista lenses from Fujinon and had given them some feedback to what the market wanted. The lenses are very impressive.” VMI’s commercial director, Ian Jackson, was also complimentary about the zooms but was glad the company listened to where the market trends were. “This is an interesting range and reasonably small, like the Leitz zooms that have less range perhaps, so you have two lenses and one lens change. But they’re usable and workable in real environments.” Though Bassett did ponder if large format might become like the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ for the professional video world. “For the majority of productions, there is little advantage [in using large format]. We don’t want lots of out-of-focus footage, but perhaps just get a really good focus puller,” he muses.
or a 35mm rather than a 20mm. It has a big difference in how things look,” he says. But is this style and famed perspective shift enough for people? Bassett recently held a large format day at CVP and fielded all the questions that a new format brings. “We had two cameras next to each other; one was shooting in full frame and the other in Super 35. They both had the equivalent field of view, although one was 50mm and the other was an 85mm from memory. The 50mm was shooting at T1.5 and the 85mm, to recreate the same perceived depth-of-field, had to be opened to about T2.6. What that means practically is that you can have lenses that have a rating of T2 plus and you can achieve tremendous shallow depth-of-field and, while that can look really beautiful, you can go too far and end up with a face that’s not quite square on and one eye is sharp and one eye is soft, and that’s just annoying.
Jackson, meanwhile, explained the optical advantages of shooting in full- frame. “The advantage is the perspective shift; it’s sort of the same advantage as shooting anamorphic. Your lenses aren’t quite twice the focal length to achieve the same shot size, but stylistically the most important thing is that the wide lenses and the mid-range lenses occupy a space one or two lenses tighter for the same shot size than they would on Super 35. Once you get on to long lenses, it doesn’t matter as no one is going to be able to tell the difference between a 100mm or a 135mm. “It’s the wider stuff, as in you’re shooting on a 40mm rather than a 20mm
The advantage is the perspective shift, it’s the same advantage as shooting anamorphic
ABOVE A grab from DOP Tania Freimuth’s short, shot with the Canon Sumire LF lenses
44 DEF I N I T ION | JULY 20 1 9
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