Musings of Production

We used to hunt for them like the lost child of the camera department. The perfect and unattainable fast lens. Some directors and cinematographers like Kubrik used to attach space satellite lenses to their cameras. That’s how desperate we were for more light sensitivity. Hundreds of pounds of lens just to get that little extra. So were used to lenses that open up to 1.2 or 1.4 and give us that extra stop of light we sometimes desperately needed. They may not look pretty wide open at 1.2 but you could get exposure. Sure the nose was in focus and the eyes weren’t but you could see it!

All this is changing and Lens speed is no longer what we will strive for in our world. Almost every camera shown at NAB 2010 does nor have a slow ASA speed. We are used to cameras which have a maximum speed of 500. Most cameras like the first generation RED rated out at 320 and I know a lot of people that rated them at 240. All of the cameras announced like the Epic from red, the ARRI Alexa, and the Aaton penelope digital start at ASA 800. That means if you rated your RED at 240 you’re getting a huge amount more light in. (for those that don’t understand that’s a lot more than twice the light sensitivity). So this means that were going to stop seeing people expecting us pay huge prices for fast lenses. Fast lenses are difficult to make with quality control worth speaking of and expensive to us because of that. Now i said this is changing and recent cinema lens releases prove companies are thinking this as well.

Take the new Zeiss CP2 compact primes as an example. I handled these lenses at NAB and they are simply gorgeous. Smaller than the giant red primes, a little wide at the front, and very smooth gearing. Unlike the Zeiss superspeeds that most of us are used to which open up to 1.2 most of these only go to a maximum of 2.1 opened up. If you had told me this two years ago I would have said this made them useless for low end production where we are light starved. You want me to shoot a night exterior with only available light and a lens that loses me a stop? Are you crazy? But that was on cameras that did not go cleanly to ISO 2000. Now the cameras pull so much light in at the chip sets that we simply 98% of the time have no need to open up so much. Why spend a fortune on in faster lens when we can just adjust camera sensitivity?

Hark, I hear the cry of many cinematographers saying but what about depth of field! Bah I say! Most of the time on a 35mm style sensor being below 2.8 means half your shots are out of focus and it is a nightmare blown up larger than a couple of feet. I known several film in post that have a huge focus problems from shooting wide open on a large sensor. Step away from the eye piece folks there is no need to shoot everything WTFO (wide the **** open). It is a nasty habit and you should stop it now. So ZEISS feel free to bring us slower beautiful optically gorgeous lenses. I don’t mind if they’re a little slow because if I have to shoot one more scene on a DSLR with a stock lens that has more play in the gears than the city has Starbucks I might be driven mad. Now someday I’ll be able to buy a set of 6 with a case for less than $23-30k.

P.s. I’m not saying fast, super high end lenses won’t have their place. I’d give quite a bit for a set of those stunning Leica cinema lenses I saw the other day. However, if I had that type of money I’d rather buy a house.