is a fantastic wide aperture lens which is commercially available, affordable and a great value. Personally I tend to get bored if I am walking around with a 50mm lens but with that lens, the challenge of manual focus, the ability to take photos with hardly any light, and the ability to take dreamy photos like people have never seen I have so much fun. They make it for all the major camera brands.
Overall I am impressed with Chinese lens manufacturers who make other lenses like
I've got the 7A 35mm f/1.2 in M43 which is pretty nice for a walkaround lens.
I'd probably opt for the 50mm f/1.2 since it's 1/3 the price of the f/1.05 (£90 vs £260 for the M43 mount) if I didn't already have double-digit number of 50s in PK mount that I use with an adapter (and they're surprisingly good for 30-50 year old lenses.)
(I've got a 7A 10mm f/3.5 that I've not really got around to using much but now the UK is heading into Fake Summer, there's more light to make it useful.)
Worth pointing out that there's a 2x crop factor on M43, so the 50mm M43 is effectively a 100mm. I agree that 35mm on M43 is a nice walk around length, it's a little longer than a full frame 50mm already.
There have been significant advances in mainland china made scopes in the last 5-7 years as well. For instance the Arken EP5 5-25x56, 34mm tube first focal plane. Which until recent tariffs and things sold for around $400 to 500 USD shipped. No it's not as good as a $1299 or $2199 Vortex, but it's definitely not the junk-tier stuff that was completely disregarded by everyone who wanted something usable on a budget for >500 yards.
Sky Rover is releasing binoculars that are very comparable to alpha tier Euro brands. I tested their Banner Cloud 6x32; the total build quality package isn’t quite there against my Swarovski 7x42 SLC, but optically the Sky Rover is excellent.
> multiple scenes that specifically required a very thin depth of field
The images at the end of the post are indeed amazing, but I find it funny that we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning.
For most of the history of moving pictures, cinema had the exact opposite problem: it looked for the deepest depth-of-field possible in order to make every part of the image count and not waste it to blurriness.
> we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning.
Nicco here. I didn't use a shallow depth of field here for either reason. I wanted it because all of those scenes are memories of years ago compared to the main events. Thus, I wanted to give the feeling of details blurring out as memories fade. By contrast, I shot the main events at ~f8 on the Helios, so the background is quite sharp.
The advances of modern AF and focus pulling systems truly has led to a world of consequences in amateur and even professional film making. In a world where anyone can take half decent video with the phone they always have, its a sign of "I have dedicated hardware to have taken this". The chase for toneh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ8VodC19-g
Not only do many see it as a sign of quality, it lets you ignore the set and stage more than ever. Imperfections? Anomalies? Bah they're blurred out of recognition. Of course it can be used still mindfully and tastefully however such nuance is ever more rare.
Most of my cameras both digital and film alike are medium format. While I'm more of a photographer than someone who does much with video it pains me to have to remind people regularly, just because I can get insanely shallow DoF with the creamiest bokeh they've seen doesn't mean it always makes sense to. Theres a story to be told with foregrounds and backgrounds, and how they can be used to guide the viewer.
> we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning
It's not necessarily a sign of "quality", but it is something we see less often, which makes it more interesting. Phone cameras can't do shallow depth of field, for example.
And of course, the human eye also has a limited DoF range. It is interesting to see things in a way that we cannot directly perceive.
The harder to achieve has prestige due to rarity. When the rarity goes away the prestige makes whatever the item was highly popular before the prestige fades. Then the older form becomes more rare and valued by some, in a manner not quite the same as prestige but as a sort of decerning choice.
White bread did this, as did purple dye, and synthetic materials.
Technically the images look great, very impressive. Production-wise I can also see how this could be useful for low-budget interior dialogue scenes where you don't want the set dressing to distract. It really draws focus to the actors and lets the director paint a more impressionistic backdrop.
The exterior shots I've got more mixed feelings about. I think these shallow lenses work best when you have a very controlled backdrop that can be deliberately staged. Using it in a wide outdoor shot feels like a real risk unless you're doing some Kubrickian blocking to make sure everyone is arranged just-so. Or you're making them stand stock-still.
This is an option I wanted to experiment with, but when I decided to use it for the short film it died off in my mind. (I even checked how many fps we'd get with a scanner...)
Unfortunate typo: the article says "Having placed the fresnel lens, we're not able to get an usable image on the whole 40x30cm sensor." but I think the "not" should be "now". Having "not" reverse the meaning of the critical sentence!
> And, the combination of wide-angle-view and super-high-aperture would literally require light to pass through the metal of the camera in order to reach the sensor:
This isn’t necessarily true when using a retrofocus wideangle design (as most modern ultrawide lenses do).
To be honest, if that's not the part where physics fail, it's going to be the actual production of the lenses... Either way, there's no such lens available to the market.
Shoot with smaller sensors and step down your lens. The bigger the sensor the shallower the depth of field at given f-stop. For example when shooting with an APS-C camera at f2.8 you're going to get the same amount of light on the sensor but less background blur than when shooting on a "full frame" camera at the same f-stop. So if stepping down the lens is not an option because there's not enough light you can still get a little bit less background separation and blur when shooting with APS-C or MFT cameras.
Also the wider the lens the less background separation you get. 135mm lens at f2.8 is going to have razor thin depth of field while a wide angle 28mm is going to get way more in focus.
Also hyperfocal distance. With wide angle lenses you can get pretty much everything from few meters away all the way to infinity in focus at the same time. That's why (I think) all phone lenses are wide angle.
Well, obviously large format cameras are nothing new. The point here is: for these kind of apertures and wide angles we need a super large area to expose, and usually either (a) they're smaller with digital cameras, or (b) they use film and thus cannot record videos. This is specifically the approach that uses a depth of field adapter to be able to record videos on these, which is also not new (I provided references at the end of the article), but it is quite rare! Also, each design of there depth of field adapters is quite different and I think it's interesting to see the differences between them all.
This lens
https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05
is a fantastic wide aperture lens which is commercially available, affordable and a great value. Personally I tend to get bored if I am walking around with a 50mm lens but with that lens, the challenge of manual focus, the ability to take photos with hardly any light, and the ability to take dreamy photos like people have never seen I have so much fun. They make it for all the major camera brands.
Overall I am impressed with Chinese lens manufacturers who make other lenses like
https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-9mm-f-5-6-ff-rl/
which again are a great value and let me take pictures you haven't seen before.
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/9mm
I've got the 7A 35mm f/1.2 in M43 which is pretty nice for a walkaround lens.
I'd probably opt for the 50mm f/1.2 since it's 1/3 the price of the f/1.05 (£90 vs £260 for the M43 mount) if I didn't already have double-digit number of 50s in PK mount that I use with an adapter (and they're surprisingly good for 30-50 year old lenses.)
(I've got a 7A 10mm f/3.5 that I've not really got around to using much but now the UK is heading into Fake Summer, there's more light to make it useful.)
Worth pointing out that there's a 2x crop factor on M43, so the 50mm M43 is effectively a 100mm. I agree that 35mm on M43 is a nice walk around length, it's a little longer than a full frame 50mm already.
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Manual focus I keep for film, I feel like it's a part of the process.
But I do wish my Sony 50 was a little less noisy/slow. Suppose I should pick up the GM version at some point.
I have found TTArtisans 50mm f0.95 to be quite nice.
There have been significant advances in mainland china made scopes in the last 5-7 years as well. For instance the Arken EP5 5-25x56, 34mm tube first focal plane. Which until recent tariffs and things sold for around $400 to 500 USD shipped. No it's not as good as a $1299 or $2199 Vortex, but it's definitely not the junk-tier stuff that was completely disregarded by everyone who wanted something usable on a budget for >500 yards.
Sky Rover is releasing binoculars that are very comparable to alpha tier Euro brands. I tested their Banner Cloud 6x32; the total build quality package isn’t quite there against my Swarovski 7x42 SLC, but optically the Sky Rover is excellent.
> multiple scenes that specifically required a very thin depth of field
The images at the end of the post are indeed amazing, but I find it funny that we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning.
For most of the history of moving pictures, cinema had the exact opposite problem: it looked for the deepest depth-of-field possible in order to make every part of the image count and not waste it to blurriness.
It's a weird reversal of expectations.
> we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning.
Nicco here. I didn't use a shallow depth of field here for either reason. I wanted it because all of those scenes are memories of years ago compared to the main events. Thus, I wanted to give the feeling of details blurring out as memories fade. By contrast, I shot the main events at ~f8 on the Helios, so the background is quite sharp.
The advances of modern AF and focus pulling systems truly has led to a world of consequences in amateur and even professional film making. In a world where anyone can take half decent video with the phone they always have, its a sign of "I have dedicated hardware to have taken this". The chase for toneh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ8VodC19-g
Not only do many see it as a sign of quality, it lets you ignore the set and stage more than ever. Imperfections? Anomalies? Bah they're blurred out of recognition. Of course it can be used still mindfully and tastefully however such nuance is ever more rare.
Most of my cameras both digital and film alike are medium format. While I'm more of a photographer than someone who does much with video it pains me to have to remind people regularly, just because I can get insanely shallow DoF with the creamiest bokeh they've seen doesn't mean it always makes sense to. Theres a story to be told with foregrounds and backgrounds, and how they can be used to guide the viewer.
Isn't it also related to wanting images to appear how we would see them in person? Our eyes blur everything we aren't looking at directly, don't they?
To be honest, the aperture of our eyes is so small that, yeah, we do blur background, but nowhere an near as most lenses do.
> we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning
It's not necessarily a sign of "quality", but it is something we see less often, which makes it more interesting. Phone cameras can't do shallow depth of field, for example.
And of course, the human eye also has a limited DoF range. It is interesting to see things in a way that we cannot directly perceive.
The harder to achieve has prestige due to rarity. When the rarity goes away the prestige makes whatever the item was highly popular before the prestige fades. Then the older form becomes more rare and valued by some, in a manner not quite the same as prestige but as a sort of decerning choice.
White bread did this, as did purple dye, and synthetic materials.
Technically the images look great, very impressive. Production-wise I can also see how this could be useful for low-budget interior dialogue scenes where you don't want the set dressing to distract. It really draws focus to the actors and lets the director paint a more impressionistic backdrop.
The exterior shots I've got more mixed feelings about. I think these shallow lenses work best when you have a very controlled backdrop that can be deliberately staged. Using it in a wide outdoor shot feels like a real risk unless you're doing some Kubrickian blocking to make sure everyone is arranged just-so. Or you're making them stand stock-still.
Could also combine with the "scanner back" and not have the intermediary screen you have to photograph.
Of course everything has to remain quite still…
Next level indeed: https://youtu.be/KSvjJGbFCws
This is an option I wanted to experiment with, but when I decided to use it for the short film it died off in my mind. (I even checked how many fps we'd get with a scanner...)
I think next-level would be a hypercentric lens that can see around / behind objects as build buy Applied Science: https://youtu.be/iJ4yL6kaV1A?si=QG7YfeXkOqzoK46O
Unfortunate typo: the article says "Having placed the fresnel lens, we're not able to get an usable image on the whole 40x30cm sensor." but I think the "not" should be "now". Having "not" reverse the meaning of the critical sentence!
They also keep saying definitively instead of definitely :)
Sorry, I promise I'll spend more time spell checking my articles from now on.
Are none of the images meant to load on mobile? I have to assume not, since without them I can't make sense of the article.
This photographer seems to be chasing the Alec Soth look which can be had with a large format camera and a scanner back.
https://www.mcad.edu/events/visiting-artist-lecture-alec-sot...
> And, the combination of wide-angle-view and super-high-aperture would literally require light to pass through the metal of the camera in order to reach the sensor:
This isn’t necessarily true when using a retrofocus wideangle design (as most modern ultrawide lenses do).
To be honest, if that's not the part where physics fail, it's going to be the actual production of the lenses... Either way, there's no such lens available to the market.
Doesn’t that remove the narrow depth of focus the author is going for?
No. Depth of field is determined by aperture and focal length. Whether or not a lens has a retrofocus design isn’t relevant.
what if I want the opposite effect?
I hate blur, how do I remove all of it?
Shoot with smaller sensors and step down your lens. The bigger the sensor the shallower the depth of field at given f-stop. For example when shooting with an APS-C camera at f2.8 you're going to get the same amount of light on the sensor but less background blur than when shooting on a "full frame" camera at the same f-stop. So if stepping down the lens is not an option because there's not enough light you can still get a little bit less background separation and blur when shooting with APS-C or MFT cameras. Also the wider the lens the less background separation you get. 135mm lens at f2.8 is going to have razor thin depth of field while a wide angle 28mm is going to get way more in focus. Also hyperfocal distance. With wide angle lenses you can get pretty much everything from few meters away all the way to infinity in focus at the same time. That's why (I think) all phone lenses are wide angle.
Get a nikon j1/v1.
Shoot at high f numbers - as high as the lens will take without inducing diffraction.
Shoot at f/64
There was a whole group of people who did this, apparently.
Shoot at a higher fstop with a sensor with a high native ISO, like 12,800.
The trade off is so much noise
Focus stacking.
pinhole camera and an insane amount of light.
Or, multiple exposures and HDR.
Not sure how multiple exposures helps?
Smaller sensor, tighter aperture. So yes, more light or a more sensitive sensor.
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> Now, here's the kicker:
Come on now.
Bro discovered large format cameras. Yeah I didn't read the whole thing.
Edit: Some examples: https://sandyphimester.com This really is nothing new.
Well, obviously large format cameras are nothing new. The point here is: for these kind of apertures and wide angles we need a super large area to expose, and usually either (a) they're smaller with digital cameras, or (b) they use film and thus cannot record videos. This is specifically the approach that uses a depth of field adapter to be able to record videos on these, which is also not new (I provided references at the end of the article), but it is quite rare! Also, each design of there depth of field adapters is quite different and I think it's interesting to see the differences between them all.
I guess it's pretty interesting for video but still not sure about calling it next-level. This look is as old as photography itself.