GEAR COOL LENSES GO FOR THE FULL TILT!
is in focus, then by selecting a wide aperture, you can make everything away from that plane very soft and out of focus. It’s like being able to choose exactly where you want your out-of-focus areas to be. It gives a creative and technically minded filmmaker a whole new tool to use. Schneider-Kreuznach has a whole family of full-frame Xenon prime lenses that allow you to tilt the focus plane. Turning a dial angles the lens to the camera body by up four degrees either way from the standard zero setting. That allows the plane of focus itself to be altered by up to 80°. It takes planning, practice and patience to nail it. But when you do nail it, then you are rewarded with a super high-quality image that really can add a new and highly stylised dimension to your filmmaking.
Tilt-shift lenses were designed to correct converging verticals and extend depth-of-field for technical stills photography. The idea is that you can tilt the lens so that a product is in line with the plane of focus, then it can be kept 100% sharp even at wide apertures, and anything out of that plane drops off in sharpness very quickly. By using very wide apertures, it gives the ‘miniature world’ look, where a scene can look like a scale model. Filmmakers have been known to do some ‘lens whacking’, where a lens is actually handheld near the camera, to create fun and unusual effects like these, but the images are not very sharp. What using a controllable, sharp tilt-shift lens allows you to do is choose a plane of focus and set the lens so that everything in that plane
ABOVE The Schneider-Kreuznach Xenon FF-Prime Cine-Tilt lens lets you alter the plane of focus for unusual looks
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slight purple fringing on very extreme backlit highlights, and significant flare in backlighting in the wider lenses. Once you know this, you can use it to your advantage to create some unusual, dreamy looks.
A set of matched lenses means the colour and exposure should be consistent between every optic. And the premium brands offer super-crisp images with lots of contrast, very little flare and no aberrations with sharpness right across the frame. However, sometimes more budget lenses aren’t as crisp or well controlled, which can be an advantage to a more creative filmmaker – if you know how to get the best out of them. We used a set of Veydra primes, which are good quality and resolve well, but wide open, there is a slight fall-off in the corners and maximum sharpness isn’t at it best, so you can use this for a creative look. The lenses render out-of- focus highlights with a lovely smoothness, but there is some
ABOVE The Veydra lenses can flare significantly, but that’s part of their charm.
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