(Vimeo)

One thing that I learned since getting into anamorphic is that fast apertures and anamorphic adapters do not mix. Most adapters will rarely work faster than f/2.0, with a lot of them going around 2.8-4.0. The fastest full anamorphic lens ever made is the Panavision 50mm f/1.0. Well, I think my 17.5mm f/0.95 has it beat.

My anamorphic is an unbranded 1.33x from the 90’s. While it may look like something from the Century Optics line, it’s more similar to the Sony VCL-W169. I have modded it a bit and it now has a filter ring, and have cleaned the class inside and out. I personally think some of the shots I get from it are better than the Century Optics stuff I have seen online. But as of now I have only tested it against the SLR Magic Anamorphot. Against the anamorphot it has it’s minuses and pluses, one of the big positives is that mine is smaller and doesn’t really vignette at all with the Voightlander. At night you can’t even really tell there is any vignette at all, especially in 4K.

I had been wanting to shoot a real test with this combo for awhile. I had done some test shots comparing it to the SLR Magic (may post those later) and various other things, but I really wanted to wait until I could get it on a GH4 or GH5. Got tired of waiting and my friend Yumiko was free to help with shooting, so I figured I’d go ahead and do one.

I shot at mostly 200 and 400 ISO, with maybe one shot at 600. I had planned to shoot the whole thing at 60p, but I had some issues with flickering at a shutter speed of 100 at random times, but I think it depends on the lights (It was really odd and random) so I may do another one all at 60 fps later. The under-cranked video was done at shutter speed 2 and then sped up in post. I also experimented with interpolating the 30 fps video to 24 fps, which worked nicely.

Used a +0.50 diopter for most of the shots of Yumiko. I think I used a +1.0 one time and then a +3.0 for the flowers at the end. I used a variable ND filter for the under-cranked video.

I told her we’d only be an hour. I didn’t want to spend all night composing a few shots. I wanted to see what I could do run-and-gun and then evolve what I learn for projects later. The +0.5 diopter really is magic… It’s what makes most of these shots possible. But even with it’s razor-thin focus, shots without the diopters can be just as sharp after a few meters or infinity. My only regret is that I didn’t go the extra mile and set up the Beholder for this rig. I didn’t give it much thought at the start because I had orignally planned to shot 60fps and thought it wouldn’t be and issue. Walking with that rig wasn’t too bad either way.

Lastly, I tried Speedgrade for the first time. I am usually horrible at color correcting, but I think I’m finally getting somewhere in Speedgrade. I decided to try it out to help simplify my workflow and it worked very well. I’ll do a few practice videos this week and watch a few tutorials to see if I can improve even more.

I have been shooting a lot lately, but nothing really complete. Just really trying to master what I have, or at least figure out how to get the best out of it. Might have to change a few things to get where I really want to be. Stay tuned…