When you look through your camera lens, ask yourself, “what is this frame telling the viewer?” Be conscious of what you include and what you leave out. The makeup of each one of these is important, and your focal length will help determine which elements of your environment are visible. When you’re making a movie, you’re very much like a painter who shows viewers 24 or 30 canvasses every second. Super wide lenses show an unusually wide area and are useful for both sweeping vistas but also in very tight spaces, like a car, or an elevator. Super telephoto lenses are good for bringing in action that’s very far away - whether it’s capturing a dancer on stage from the very back of a theater or a rooftop action fight sequence from another building, super-telephotos will help you get close. Some lenses are extreme and they’re usually called “super” lenses - super-wide lenses show an unusually wide area and are useful for both sweeping vistas but also in very tight spaces, like a car or an elevator. If the scene calls for 51 mm or 48 mm, you can do that, and you can also zoom in or out while you’re filming. Today’s sharp zoom lenses mean that you don’t have to be stuck with a single focal length you can modify it to fit your needs. If you want your subjects to appear in front of a soft, out-of-focus background, choosing a normal or telephoto lens with a wide aperture is a good way to do i Zooming: Changing your focal length on the fly If, on the other hand, you want objects in the background to also be in focus, a wide-angle lens with a smaller aperture is what you’ll want. If you want your subjects to appear in front of a soft, out-of-focus background, choosing a normal or telephoto lens with a wide aperture is a good way to do it. For more on this, check out this excellent video on understanding and mastering depth of field. Wide-angle lenses minimize the out-of-focus areas, and normal and telephoto lenses exaggerate it. The focal length of a lens produces several side effects that can work for or against a director, and one of these is exaggerating the depth of field or the out-of-focus areas in a frame. Depth of field: Lens choice isn’t all about distance Focal length is an important tool used in cinematography. At their simplest, lenses are either “wide” meaning they show a lot of the scene, “normal” meaning things look about the size they normally do, to someone not looking through a camera lens and “telephoto” meaning things farther away look closer. The focal length of the lens will determine the shot’s field of view or how much of the scene is captured in the frame. They do this, in part, by choosing different focal lengths of lenses to use. In the real world around us, there are three hundred and sixty degrees of information, and it’s the director’s job, along with the cinematographer, to figure out which very few degrees of that vista best help tell the story to the viewer. We’ve got this picture in our minds of a director holding her fingers up in twin L shapes, one inverted, and peering through the box they make, planning how to frame the shot.
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