ACADEMY ULTIMATE GUIDE TO LENSES
SPECIAL USE LENSES
By taking the premium Schneider- Kreuznach Xenon lenses and adding a tilt facility, you’ve got two lenses in one. Going from normal prime to tilt is as easy as turning a dial. It doesn’t add much weight or bulk to the lens overall, and lets you get results you just can’t with other lenses. It takes some setting up and understanding how to use the tilt facility, but once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s fantastic. There is nothing you can do in post to get anything close to the effect of being able to tilt mid-shot. It’s a feature that actually lets you do something very different and immediately noticeable in your work, rather than just being a detail tweak of something like colour rendition or micro contrast. Turning a dial angles the lens to the camera body by up to four degrees either way from the standard zero setting. That allows the plane of focus itself to be altered by up to 80°, depending on focal length and aperture, which is huge. By tilting the lens, for example, so that a product is in line with the plane of focus, it can be kept 100% sharp even at wide apertures. And anything out of that plane drops off in sharpness very quickly.
It’s this effect used at wide apertures that gives the popular ‘miniature world’ look. The big issue is the price. The 50mm lens is around £4999/$5598, which compares to £3069/$3360 for the non-tilt version. But if you can afford it, there are very few reasons why you wouldn’t go for the tilt versions over the standard Xenons. Another type of lens that has two uses is a dedicated macro lens. It means you can get in really close for detail shots, and at such close distances the depth-of- field can be wafer-thin, opening another creative opportunity. At more normal distances, macro lenses produce a well- defined, neutral image. Most camera manufacturers offer a macro lens among their regular AF offerings, but for filmmaking, there are two stand-out optics. The first is a real cine prime lens, the new full-frame Irix 150mm T3.0 Macro, which offers 1:1 reproduction. The lens oozes quality, from its weather proof and solid build to clever accessories like the included magnetically-attached lens hood. It’s a photo-style, petal-shaped hood that does a great job in stopping unwanted flare, and you can reverse it for safe
“It’s a feature that lets you do something immediately noticeable”
storage. But if you want to use a cinema- style matte box and flag-style hood, the front of the lens is the standard 95mm size for easy fitting. The aperture ring is smooth and has a 75° throw, while the focus ring is also silky-smooth and has a long, 270° movement. Both have standardised 0.8 pitch cine gears for rigs. There is no noticeable vignetting, and the 11-bladed rounded aperture gives a smooth and attractive bokeh. What the macro capability does is allow you to get in really close, right up to 35cm/13.78in. This is a reasonable distance so the lens doesn’t cast a shadow on your subject, yet allows 1:1 reproduction of the subject on the sensor. A UK price has yet to be set, but the US price is just $1295. Even more affordable is the Voigtlander 110mm f/2.5 MACRO APO-Lanthar at £875/$1099. It’s not a cine lens but a manual focus DSLR-style lens and, like the Irix, comes in a range of fitments. The APO-Lanthar focuses as close as 35cm to give life-size magnification without any extra accessories. The longer focal length allows a comfortable working distance when shooting close up, and also gives a flattering perspective for portrait and general work. This lens is a top quality piece of engineering with an all-metal body.
IMAGES From a tilting lens like the Scheinder (top left) to macro lenses such as Voigtlander (top right) and Irix (right), some lenses have more than one use so can be a great buy
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PRO MOVIEMAKER SPRING 2020
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