Thanks cgiff, I think I'll turn this thread into my in progress updates on custom glass.
Empire - Strangely I haven't filmed much more than a few tests with the anamorphic optics. Mostly due to the extremely difficulty of pulling focus acurately, and I currently don't own a field monitor that unsqueezes the frame. But I will shoot something over the summer once I finish up on a nice wide angle concept.
Daniel Buck - Rad. I'm curious to see what other in lens effects can be achieved via optics, not just filters and what not.
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Alright, as promised heres some more anamorphic stuff.
So previously there was this frame, which is a 2x 100mm anamorphic lens:
I wanted to show you what it actually looked like in camera and unsqueezed:
Let me tell you, when I first saw this I knew I was going to be losing more $$ on anamorphic glass. Having a sharp and usable one shot panorama digital camera flipped me out.
Onto the Isco.
Here's the Isco Gottingen lens on my 1Ds Mark III. Originally this lens was made to be used on Nikon film cameras and was extremely easy to adapt to Canon via a metal adapter. It uses a screw mount front anamorphic lens attached to a 50mm fixed prime. You only focus with the front anamorphic glass. As ACElkins mentioned, it's not the sharpest lens in the world, but it is usable to a certain degree. They are fairly rare lenses to come by, and are usually several hundred dollars, which makes the expense a bit harder to swallow due to it being a manual focus lens.
Here are some images from it that I shot this weekend. (No, that's not my car)
Isco @ f/8
Isco @ f/2.8
Isco @ f/8
Isco @ f/8
Isco @ f/16
I find that if you are careful f/2.8 is almost usable. f/8 seems to be my happy spot on the lens.
Onto another anamorphic experiment!
One of the other anamorphic lenses I have is a 1.75x Kowa lens. I had a small adapter machined so I can put it on a 100mm f/2 lens a while ago.
Kowa 100mm f/8
Kowa 100mm f/16
The cool thing about this lens though, is that the optics are high enough quality to shoot through the aperture range, so shallow depth of field is possible. I believe I can even do macro work with it as well, but need to make a small plate thing first before I do that.
Kowa 100mm f/8
Kowa 100mm f/4
Kowa 100mm f/2.8
Again, it's difficult to focus due to the alignment of plains and double focusing via lens and anamorphic element, but I find I can eyeball the distance with the anamorphic element and actually most of the time auto focus with the Canon 100mm f/2, which I find very useful.
Here's an unsqueezed image from the camera of the last image.
That's what you're seeing through the viewfinder and yes it does make framing a bit more time consuming.
This coming weekend I'm going to likely rip apart some old Canon lenses and see what I can find in there. Also, I'll be working on that wide angle anamorphic idea, but I'm still shopping around for more glass. Hopefully I'll have results soon.
I just replaced an element in my 100mm f/2 2x anamorphic lens and did some testing.
All of the above rectangles were shot with the 100mm f/2 2x anamorphic with different lighting tests and no post processing. The last two rectangles on the bottom were shot with the 50mm f/2.8 1.5x Isco anamorphic lens.
Here's what the squeezed version looks like:
The reason I swapped out the 2x glass was due to sharpness. Now at native resolution it produces this:
Downsides are that there is a little ghosting off highlights, like below:
I'm still experimenting and I'm really just short of designing an optical adapter from scratch at this point. I have no real idea why I've been doing this these past few years. I mean, logically, you can indeed just crop. But there is something rather appealing about anamorphic images and shooting with a strange format on a full frame camera.
Cheers DocsPics. I know the feeling. I lived on a horse ranch without hot water for a year and a half in a small trailer in my late teens. I knew right there I didn't want to do that for much longer.
kds315 - It's Canon + Panavision + Kowa + Russian combo at the moment. The new thing I'm working on will be all Panavision if everything works out.
