1/13/2024 0 Comments Sigma cinemaOne actors fist can miss another’s face by 10 inches, but if the camera is at the right angle, and the other actor knows how to “sell” the punch, it will look as though it really made contact.Īnother great example is the classic “walk away from the explosion” shot, which is a staple of classic action film trailers. It wasn’t long after the long lens was developed that filmmakers discovered a compelling side effect that enhanced the magic of cinema: the compression of space had great advantages in creating movie magic.īecause of the compression, long lenses make two objects that are actually several feet from one another look as though they are much closer. “The camera adds 10 pounds” is something that is usually seen on broadcast multi-camera setups, such as interviews and sitcoms, where cameras have to been far enough from their subjects to avoid seeing the other cameras in their shots. Longer than that and you tend to get a ‘flatness’ that isn’t always seen as flattering. Most portrait photographers use an 85mm lens, which is seen flattering to human features. The human head is no exception, and the longer the lens used to photograph it, the less ‘dimension’ the head will have. This goes for the geographical space between objects, as well as the objects themselves. Long Lenses Compress SpaceĪnother attribute of long lenses is that they compress space. The two camera focus’s the viewers attention exclusively on the two characters and their friendship and betrayal, elevating it to something the transcends time and place. The filmmakers chose to shoot on a very wide lens, making the city of Baltimore, where the series is set, turn from brick and mortar buildings to just a play of lights and shapes. In a scene from the award winning HBO series the Wire, two characters meet for the last time, having already betrayed one another in the scenes leading up. All that matters is the variation of brightness and color.įilmmakers have long used long lenses to communicate distance between a character and their surroundings, or to focus the audiences attention on a character to the exclusion of all else. You could take a portrait in the middle of a trash dump and no one would be the wiser. As long as there is sufficient distance between the subject and the background, whatever is behind the subject will disappear into blobs of light and color. Because long lenses, combined with a low f-stop, provide a shallow depth of field. If photographers ever want to take a flattering portrait in an unflattering environment, one surefire method is to use a long lens, the longer the better. For the video at the end of this article, I shot with the SIGMA 100-400mm DG DN OS Contemporary. Several full frame cameras, such as the SIGMA fp, allow you to crop in on the sensor, effectively making your lens 50% longer with he click of a button, all without sacrificing resolution or compression. This means that a 100mm lens on a super 35 sensor will have the same field of view as a 150mm lens on a full frame. If you move to a super 35 sensor, you gain a extra 50% crop, so the lens will appear that much longer. If 50mm on a full frame sensor is a standard, anything longer than 75mm is generally considered long. Like all lens and camera discussions, the “longness” of a lens depends entirely on the mm of the lens and the size of the cameras sensor (or for celluloid, the size of the film plate). Let’s take a look at the SIGMA Cine 135mm T2 and the 100-400mm DG DN OS Contemporary. Long lenses are a powerful tool for storytelling, because of how differently they see space from the regular human eye, an effect filmmakers use for a variety of reasons. First invented to photograph objects that photographers couldn’t get close to, the long lens has since become a staple in cinematography because of the effects it has on space and perspective.
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