View Full Version : Control your DOF on the MKII


Ray Bell
February 19th, 2009, 06:25 PM
As posted, Canon just put out two new tilt and shift lenses....

for those folks that like maximum DOF control, here is a demonstration of a standard
lens versus a tilt and shift...

http://www.aobild.se/externalcontent/ts-e/guitar/tsdemo.htm

And how it works...

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/tilt-shift-lenses2.htm

Olof Ekbergh
February 20th, 2009, 06:36 AM
These are great articles.

And it is interesting that the MKII has made it possible to get this kind of control in video, pretty much unheard of unless you really jury rigged something.

I personally always loved to work with view cameras ever since the early 70's, but I never considered it for film / video.

The more tools you have the better you can tell your story, and that is what it is all about.

I think the MKII is the start of a revolution.

Jon Fairhurst
February 20th, 2009, 12:08 PM
Tilt shift is pretty specialized for video. About the only place I notice it is in Heroes, when one of the characters goes into a trance.

Daniel Browning
February 20th, 2009, 01:13 PM
I hope to get a nice tilt/shift for my 5D2 some day, there are so many possibilities for unique images.

It would be funny if someone used it to get *deep* DOF. ("I went to 35mm and all I got was deep DOF and this lousy T-shirt")

Bill Binder
February 20th, 2009, 02:19 PM
I hope to get a nice tilt/shift for my 5D2 some day, there are so many possibilities for unique images.

It would be funny if someone used it to get *deep* DOF. ("I went to 35mm and all I got was deep DOF and this lousy T-shirt")

The irony of course is back in the day they used to go to extraordinary lengths to get deep focus (if my memory serves me right, they even designed new lenses just for that purpose, some of which were used in Citizen Kane).

Jon Fairhurst
February 20th, 2009, 06:29 PM
Hitchcock once wanted a shot with an extreme perspective of a gun barrel in the foreground and the shooter in the background, and he wanted everything in focus. The solution? Lots of lights, a small aperture - and a GIANT model of a gun!

Darren Jew
February 20th, 2009, 07:33 PM
You want extreme depth of field, you want one of these :)

Frazier lens - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazier_lens)

I'ts had a messy history...
Australian invention dazzles Hollywood - Jim Frazier (http://www.wipo.int/sme/en/case_studies/frazier.htm)
The cameraman and the piranhas - smh.com.au (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/13/1052591785954.html)

And here's the panavision page
http://www.panavision.com/product_detail.php?maincat=1&cat=217&id=86&node=c0,c49,c50,c87,c90

Bill Binder
February 21st, 2009, 03:06 AM
Hitchcock once wanted a shot with an extreme perspective of a gun barrel in the foreground and the shooter in the background, and he wanted everything in focus. The solution? Lots of lights, a small aperture - and a GIANT model of a gun!

They also did crazy stuff like lighting the foreground keeping the background dark, shooting it, then rewinding the film, lighting the background keeping the foreground dark, and then re-exposing the same film again. CLASSIC ingenuity!

Jon Fairhurst
February 21st, 2009, 01:58 PM
They also did crazy stuff like lighting the foreground keeping the background dark, shooting it, then rewinding the film, lighting the background keeping the foreground dark, and then re-exposing the same film again. CLASSIC ingenuity!You REALLY need a lens that doesn't breathe (and GREAT stabilization) to pull that off!

This is similar, in some ways, to Ansel Adams bracketing his photos and intermixing the results to simulate extreme dynamic range.