The subject area of this report is lenses, specifically how different lenses reproduce and manipulate light in different ways. This report will explore and discover how these differences between lenses affects the story and emotion in a scene. This will help a DP, director or cameraman chose the best lens for conveying the emotion and story to the audience.

These quotes will be useful for research into anamorphic glass. The first quote is from the website of RED cameras and it describes what anamorphic lenses are.

‘Spherical lenses project images onto the sensor without affecting their aspect ratio. Anamorphic lenses, on the other hand, project a version of the image that is compressed along the longer dimension (usually by a factor of two).’ (Understanding Anamorphic lenses, 2017)

This is a reliable source as the camera company is used by industry professionals and so there website needs to be accurate for them to sustain business. The second quote is from the renowned cinematographer John Mathieson who said in an interview with Cooke Optics TV,

‘You need to make sure you have  a lens that will help you get down there, and a spherical lens, even if its under exposed will look allot better under exposed than an anamorphic lens, because you get a true stop. they’ll hold the sharpness better, even though they’re under exposed the blacks will be solid. and an anamorphic lens when its under exposed, everything will start wobbling, you cant see the edges of things anymore, they mush in together.’ (John Mathieson, CookeOpticsTV, 2016)

This quote from John Mathieson is useful for understanding the characteristics of anamorphic lenses and its credible information as he’s a cinematographer with lots of professional experience with anamorphic lenses over many years. 

The report will also include primary lens comparison tests. Cinematographers also do lens tests before choosing what lens to use on a film. The cinematographer Jarin Blaschke conducted lens tests and wrote about them in filmmaker magazine. He describes the characteristics of the different anamorphic lenses and how they will perform for his film.

‘The Series 2s still had a beautiful astigmatic swirl to the backgrounds and pleasant vignetting. Bright sources glowed for a little atmosphere, but not too much to totally destroy the image.'(Mulcahey et al., 2017).

‘I loved the swirly bokeh of the Series 1s, but Panavision didn’t have them all rehoused then. But they probably would have crossed the line in ghosting anyway with all the bright windows in the movie.’ (Mulcahey et al., 2017).

The magazine is very credible because its red by people in the industry so the information needs to be correct as the readers would know if its not. Even though the facts may be credible, some of his information is about aesthetics of a lens which is about personal preference meaning that someone else may think differently about a certain lens to him.

When researching the affects of focal lengths most books were not very useful. Some talked about focal lengths but its not very useful to this report. The first book says ‘ A telephoto lens visually “compresses”‘. (Artis, 2011, P46) ‘A normal lens (mid-zoom or 50mm if were talking 35mm DSLR camera prime lens) is the standard for close-up portrait shots of faces. A normal lens looks the most natural’ (Artis, 2011, p47).

The second book says

‘A lens designed to have a long focal length behaves as a narrow or telephoto system. The subject appears much closer than normal, but you can only see a smaller part of the scene. Depth and distance look unnaturally compressed in the shot.’ (Owens and Millerson, 2011, p105)

and ‘wide angle system takes in correspondingly more of the scene. But now subjects will look much further away; depth and distance appear exaggerated.’ (Owens and Millerson, 2011, p105). Both books seem to agree with each other about how lens focal lengths affect the compression of space and the books are written by people who work in industry. Because of these points the information from these books are credible but they are more about freelance camerawork so don’t offer the most useful information to this report. 

An article in the website Fstoppers talked about lenses and how to use them. Whilst talking about wide lenses they say ‘Let’s imagine that we want to create an epic scene showing off the drama of the landscape and the solitude of the runner within it. Using a wide lens to shoot from a distance will do just that. It will make the athlete into a tiny part of this grand landscape and will emphasize his solitude by showing the vast emptiness around him.’(Sasso, 2016). This is useful information as it describes one way of using a wide lens to affect the audiences perception of the scene.

The useful information from these articles, books and videos is how telephoto lenses compress the space in a shot, normal 50mm lenses make a persons face the most natural, anamorphic lenses have allot of imperfections that make them less suitable for shooting in the dark. This will influence the report by assisting with the understanding of lenses.

Bibliography

Artis, A.Q. (2011) The shut up and shoot: Freelance video guide: A down & dirty DV production. Boston: Elsevier/Focal Press.

CookeOpticsTV (2016) Masterclass || John Mathieson – choosing lenses (part 2) || Anamorphic and spherical. Available at: https://youtu.be/rWAp4Fv9RvE (Accessed: 30 January 2017).

Mulcahey, M., Staff, F., Harris, M., Harris, B. and Dawson, N. (2017) The witch DP Jarin Blaschke’s lens tests (with stills). Available at: http://filmmakermagazine.com/97621-the-witch-dp-jarin-blaschkes-lens-tests-with-stills/#.WIoUjLaLRBz (Accessed: 26 January 2017).

Owens, J. and Millerson, G. (2011) Video production handbook, fifth edition. 5th edn. Oxford, United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.

Sasso, B. (2016) My Gear and how I use it to affect emotion. Available at: https://fstoppers.com/education/my-gear-and-how-i-use-it-affect-emotion-130438 (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

Understanding Anamorphic lenses (2017) Available at: http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/anamorphic-lenses (Accessed: 23 January 2017).