COOL LENSES
THE VINTAGE CHEAPIE
There’s nothing like going for a vintage look by using a real vintage lens! We used a 53-year-old Nikon 50mm all-manual lens that had been sitting unused for around 30 years. It’s a Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f/1.4 lens we had sitting on a battered old camera, but lenses like this go for around £50/ $70 on auction sites. We mounted it to a Sony A7 using a basic Metabones adapter. The lens has seven elements in five groups and the elements are single-coated in an amber coating, as the lens was designed for shooting black & white film, and there are seven straight aperture blades. Our well-battered version
is sloppy, so precise focusing is a lottery. At f/5.6, the performance is not too bad, but if you shoot it at wider apertures, there is loads of barrel distortion, chromatic aberrations, extreme softness at the corners, wide flare and halation if used in bright sunshine, and there’s a blue colour cast, too. These flaws add a certain vintage look and feel to your
ABOVE The 50mm Sirui is the most affordable way to shoot a real anamorphic lens
AFFORDABLE ANAMORPHIC Super widescreen Cinemascope- style footage, bright blue horizontal flare streaks and ovalised bokeh is what makes an anamorphic lens so attractive, but true 2x anamorphic lenses cost a huge amount. Now there are budget options, including a set of lenses from SLR Magic, look by just shooting a wide-angle lens and then cropping in post. Composition with an anamorphic is tricky, as it’s a different shape. But that’s the idea – to have films with a different look. The optical quality of the lens itself is surprisingly good, with little vignetting and good sharpness
which also makes lens adapters, but the most affordable is from Sirui, which has a 50mm and 35mm lens as well as a new 24mm version that is about to hit the market. The Sirui 50mm costs around £600/$699 and is for APS-C sensors, so if you shoot full-frame then you need to set it to crop mode. There is a 1.33x factor, which enlarges your field of view to an equivalent of using as 37.5mm lens on an APS-C sensor, except the perspective and depth of field is that of a 50mm lens. You can’t get the
across the whole frame. There is some softening at the corners, especially at wide apertures, but this adds to the effect rather than distracting from it. The horizontal blue flares are just gorgeous and the lens does flare when provoked, which is one of the biggest attractions of an anamorphic lens. The out-of-focus highlights do take a slightly ovalised look, but this isn’t as extreme as on full-stretch 2x lenses, as the Sirui is only 1.33x.
films, with lots of unpredictable flare and odd internal reflections.
“The horizontal blue flares are gorgeous and out-of-focus highlights are ovalised”
ABOVE A vintage Nikon lens, used with a Metabones adapter to make it fit a modern Sony, can give lots of flare and aberration
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