On Lenses

And now, lenses.

In the video above, I've taken the Sony ZV-E1 and thrown three different lenses on it - the included bog standard kit lens, a vintage Nikon still lens, and a cutting-edge modern Chinese lens, using a different lens for each restaurant we visited. The takeaway? Didn't have any - the food was delicious (badum tsssh). The lens takeaway? These all seem capable of producing nice, beautiful images with pleasing, non-distracting lens characteristics.

I can sum up my view on lenses as this: the only things that really matter are ergonomics and usability because lenses basically all look the same (or are aesthetically fucked up in a way that, for the most part, draw too much attention to themselves).

I also admit I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to the topic of lenses.

Years ago, while in film school, I was fortunate enough to share a dorm floor with future Oscar-winning documentary editor Kevin Klauber and his roommate, future Emmy and Peabody award-winning photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Ed Ou. Ed had a Panasonic DVX-100, which was the first camera that was shooting 24 frames a second like a real movie camera (also the first camera that made everyone realize that just shooting 24 frames a second didn't make your movies look like real movies). Filmmakers of this era will likely recall the ludicrous Redrock Micro spinning ground glass rigs we were using to chase down that coveted 35mm depth of field (and woe unto all of us who forgot to turn on the spinning ground glass before a shot because it imparted a static texture on all your footage).

After we graduated, Ed was the guy who tipped me off that the Canon 5D camera, which the New York Times had foisted on their photojournalists, was capable of producing images that looked, finally, like real movies (despite at the time only shooting 30 fps). It was dawning on news organizations that video was going to be a crucial component of reportage on the events of the world, which meant Ed found himself on the cutting edge of the incoming DSLR revolution as a frontline photojournalist.

During school, Ed was covering stories in the Middle East and Africa. He's been held up by child soldiers armed with AKs. He doesn't hear too well out of one of his ears because the car bomb that blew up under him was targeting the other Canadian journalist, who was sitting in the back seat and he survived by sitting in the front. During college, we took a road trip to Big Sur after one photo trip (his suggestion). We drove through the night and slept in my station wagon and woke up freezing our asses off, teeth chattering. During this trip, he told me about the hairy situations he barely survived. I mostly remember how quiet he got.

Ed shoots jaw-dropping, powerful images. He also uses Canon EF lenses. So when a DP once told me that he didn't consider the Canon EF lenses to be capable of producing "cinematic images," I wanted to throttle him and scream, "Those lenses are good enough for Ed, you worthless, pretentious fuck!"

I bristle at the arrogance of filmmakers, as if movies are the final say in what constitutes a pretty picture. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs have been shot on Canon EF lenses, after all.

Besides, I always noticed that when we shot our pickups for our various projects on Canon EF glass, I often struggled to see the difference (and I should know better!). Add to this the acknowledgment that many, many people are blissfully unaware of the motion smoothing on their TVs, and you perhaps have a sense of why I think lens fetishization (like all gear fetishization) is mostly wankery. All those pretty pictures are supposed to be telling a story, after all.

Years back, with the RocketJump Film School, we ran a blind, not-scientific-at-all comparison of lenses at various price points (a progenitor, it turned out, of the $10/$100/$1,000 steak comparison videos, but with lenses). We shot in various situations mimicking what you might expect to see in a movie - wide lenses might be sitting at an f4 or f5.6 (i.e. not wide open). We utilized natural light, various subjects and settings, etc. We had a hard time distinguishing the difference between the cheap lenses and the expensive ones because everything looked pretty darn good!

A common complaint about this video was, of course, we're watching it on YouTube there's all kinds of compression you can't tell blah blah blah. But hip hop producers know that people listen to their music on iPhones in speaker mode, so they test their songs on iPhones to make sure it sounds good. Movies too have suffered a similar blow to their previous chokehold on pristine exhibition environments. Hate to break it to ya, but a movie run through compression streaming on a television is probably a best-case scenario (the other being, due to color accuracy, the iPad) and odds are that TV has motion smoothing on anyway.

At the moment, the YouTube trend for cinematography-themed professional channels suggests that what's "in" are vintage, softer, more aberrant lenses that impart character onto the images rendered. Weird bokeh? Anamorphic depth-of-field? Halation? All desirable qualities. In a nutshell: old vintage lenses? Good! New modern lenses? Bad!

YouTube content caters to an emergent group of image craftspeople - those who ply their trade making pretty pictures in all the ways that pretty pictures have become ascendant and important in our cultural landscape. This includes, but is not limited to: social media videos, marketing videos, corporate videos, events, weddings, and so on. This large cadre of moving image photographers have their own needs that don't necessarily always overlap with narrative feature films.

Meanwhile, on the other side of YouTube, there are channels that cater toward still photographers, and these channels seem to prioritize the exact opposite qualities from their lenses in reviews. Here, they prize the lack of distortion or chromatic aberrations, they talk about how lenses are "tack sharp", and are more receptive to highlighting modern lens manufacturers. In a nutshell: Old vintage lenses? Bad! New modern lenses? Good!

I think it's very easy to get lost in the weeds with all minutia of image quality and lenses. If we step back, we can assume that none of these manufacturers set out to deliberately make a shitty lens, and one can safely assume lens manufacturers are trying to avoid as many "negative" image attributes as possible while keeping costs down. After all, these are the Germans (see: 19th century optics development) and the Japanese (see: 20th century dominance in image capturing doohickeys) we're talking about! I simply cannot fathom their optical engineers seeking anything less than the best possible edge-to-edge sharpness.

A big part of the reality of making movies these days is acknowledging that the narrative feature use case is no longer the most prominent or most profitable for the people making the gear. As Apple shifted their focus away from professional desktops to their smartphone, so too have camera manufacturers shifted their focus to a far more lucrative market. For filmmakers with beefy budgets and the option to rent the reliable cinema standbys, nothing is really all that different. For everyone else, there are simply a lot more options.

On We're All Gonna Die, our DP Bongani made the wise decision of imparting a look through his filter stack atop the Zeiss LWZ.3 zoom and Zeiss CP.3 primes we used (more detail in his interview with Zeiss). There are a number of distinct moments throughout the film where the filter stack makes itself known - when shooting into light, we would often get a chromatic flare, which inspired us to build a similar chromatic rainbow effect into the sheen of the CG alien spike so that we'd be reminded of it (hopefully) whenever we saw those shots. Story-wise, those moments had a sort of visual and narrative symbolism that we really liked.

Here's what I mean:

Top: The chromatic effect of the Tiffen Smoque filter visible on the right. Bottom: Chromatic effect on a VFX element

For that movie, we found that the variation between the expensive Zeiss lenses and the not-so-expensive Canon EF glass (both with the same filter stack) was well within the bounds of correction and matching you can achieve in post. I freely intermixed Zeiss footage with composited elements shot on Canon EF glass, and some of those VFX shots are the sneakiest shots in the movie. The final composite image is not betrayed by optical differences between the lenses.

So when it comes to Nail House, we arrive at our baseline considerations: ergonomics and usability. And in that regard, I believe the most interesting place to be looking right now is Chinese lenses.

If I were to, as dispassionately as possible, sum up the nature of the Chinese manufacturing modus operandi, it would be: "Copy until you can figure out what's going on, and then improve on that."

That ethos of learning from emulation, interestingly, finds its way into Chinese artistic tradition. Calligraphers were expected to precisely imitate the calligraphic hand of prior masters as a way of benchmarking their own skills, internalizing past principles, and paying deference to the old masters and traditions.

Still photography YouTubers have been way ahead of the curve here in their embrace of Chinese lenses, by the way. They pass along rumors like how a Chinese lens company sniped a hotshot Japanese optical engineer from Tokina and gave him free rein to build his crazy ideas. That sort of corporate intrigue speaks to a hunger for innovation and improvement that, frankly, I'm just not seeing elsewhere. One must acknowledge that, at the very least, the Chinese aren't doing something like, I dunno, re-releasing a Super 8 film camera for hipsters that costs, ahem, $5,500. Chinese lenses today are what companies like Sigma and Tokina were only a few years ago - highly competent, cheaper alternatives.

And as I understand it, the assessment of the Chinese lens industry is their glass manufacturing precision is top of the line (as military advances have fed into the industry), their bodies and housing are world-class (it oughta be because everyone is making their shit there anyway), and their lens coatings lag a little behind (the net result being marginally less ability to reject flares). And to be clear - this is what I'm hearing.

At the moment, the one that's catching my attention is the Laowa Ranger S35 Compact Cine Zooms.

They're about the size and weight of a Sigma 24-70mm. Big ol' focus ring with a generous throw. Focal lengths in all the useful zoom ranges. If they're any good, they kind of obliterate the argument of primes vs. zooms because previously, the prime lens' main advantage was compactness and weight. T2.9 doesn't bother me because I suspect qualities like "wider" and "more focus depth" mean that the aperture is plenty open. Obviously, we will want to test it, but on paper it's promising.

I suspect that for Nail House, we will want a camera that is quick and responsive to movement. In our early discussions we're talking about creating a sense of chaos by kicking up dust and other particulates in the air (John Woo-style), as to design away from an overly clean aesthetic and steady fight rhythms, and to embrace a scrappy, DIY feel.

Maybe more than anything else, that's the energy we're looking to capture. I think it's crafted by how the camera moves in the hands.

I think a lot about one moment in particular in John Woo's Hard Boiled. It happens here: https://youtu.be/4OPyoJgV_YY?si=BIZLJL-keLtkS9Nm&t=162

In the midst of this one take, the camera approaches the door and has a really cool frantic quality to the handheld (was it excitement as they neared the end of a ridiculous shot?). And although it's speed ramped into the room, the fast motion kind of accentuates a sort of "giddiness." I dunno, I just like that I feel the way the camera guy is moving in this moment, and for whatever reason, every time I see this sequence that little bit of camera rushing forward movement makes me recognize the physicality of the operator. I think it adds a cool texture, and I think that's an aspect you lose in our modern one-take sequences, where the gimbals and stabilizers erase the hands of the operator and allow the camera to translate with perfect smoothness.

There are, of course, other long one takes; there's a whole treasure trove of homemade Rube Goldberg contraptions (the pre-cinema one take marvel) all across YouTube. In those bouncy handheld cell phone vertical videos, you can sometimes sense the creator's excitement as the machine progresses. I think it's a good thing.

-fw