A "Kubrick" lenses series.
- Thread starter marco70
- Start date
I was actually serious...
I was actually serious...
I think it would be very important especially for hd to have a big aperture on lenses. It would help to have less noise. That's where the 0.7 dia idea came from.
www.marcopiana.com
I was actually serious...
I think it would be very important especially for hd to have a big aperture on lenses. It would help to have less noise. That's where the 0.7 dia idea came from.
www.marcopiana.com
Greg Lowry
Carbonite Member
At the time Kubrick used the f0.7 lenses on Barry Lyndon, the available 5254 filmstock was EI (ASA) 100 which was pushed one stop. With digital sensors now at an EI of 350 or better (some already at 1000+), the need for 0.7 lenses is really behind us. Besides, with a wide open depth of field that can be measured in fractions of an inch for a closeup, 0.7 lenses would be no joy to work with. It's historically interesting that those lenses were used for only one movie -- one of the most beautiful films ever made. But I understand that the lenses (and the modified non-reflex Mitchell BNC used on Barry Lyndon) are now in the custody of Joe Dunton in the UK and are available for rental to selected projects.
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Greg Lowry
Carbonite Member
Good idea! You can create the pinhole with the point on the top of your head.
Tom Wills
Well-known member
You know that the F 0.7 lens was a NASA lens and had radioactive components, correct? And also that an F 0.7 lens is physically impossible without this radioactive substance. Technically, F1 should be the most open a lens can be, which means it sends through every single bit of light that comes into it. An F 0.7 lens AMPLIFIES light.
Yeah, so, I HIGHLY doubt anyone'd want this. I mean, it's a cool idea, but it's just not at all useful, and it's incredibly prohibitively expensive.
Yeah, so, I HIGHLY doubt anyone'd want this. I mean, it's a cool idea, but it's just not at all useful, and it's incredibly prohibitively expensive.
Indeed. I can just imagine your 1st AC fainting when you show up on set with that sucker though.
acrochordon
Well-known member
fungus
fungus
Would fungus grow on a radioactive lens?
fungus
Would fungus grow on a radioactive lens?
Greg Lowry
Carbonite Member
robot909 said:
What's our source for this information?
acrochordon
Well-known member
radioactive
radioactive
Look on the net. There were lots of lenses with radioactive material in them, made a few decades ago.
radioactive
Look on the net. There were lots of lenses with radioactive material in them, made a few decades ago.
acrochordon
Well-known member
Operation Looney
Operation Looney
I found the following on the net. If it is on the net, it must be true. Right?
"Kubrick was able to borrow the lens from NASA because they owed him a favour. President Nixon had Kubrick make photographs of the first people on the moon in a studio, as a backup, incase the real pictures would fail. A great French documentary 'Operation Lune' (dark side of the moon) was made in 2002 about this story."
Operation Looney
I found the following on the net. If it is on the net, it must be true. Right?
"Kubrick was able to borrow the lens from NASA because they owed him a favour. President Nixon had Kubrick make photographs of the first people on the moon in a studio, as a backup, incase the real pictures would fail. A great French documentary 'Operation Lune' (dark side of the moon) was made in 2002 about this story."
Greg Lowry
Carbonite Member
The lenses were designed for NASA by Zeiss. They're Hasselblad lenses. Hasselblad cameras with Zeiss lenses were used extensively for the Apollo space program. Kubrick didn't "borrow" the lenses from NASA, he bought them from Zeiss. NASA had never used the ones he bought. They were then modified by Cinema Products so they could be used on a modified (non-reflex) Mitchell BNC. The Kubrick estate still owns the lenses and they have been on public display at the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition which has been mounted in Germany and Australia so far. If the lenses have radioactive components, the level of radioactivity is inconsequential. I have a (bad) photo from the Kubrick exhibit of the modified Mitchell BNC with the Zeiss 0.7 lens which has a wide angle Kollmorgan adapter on the front. By the way, the Kubrick Exhibition is full of fascinating Kubrick artifacts, especially if you're a fanatical Kubrickologist. I think they're trying to set up in New York or LA in the near future (a year or two).
The "documentary" you mention is a highly entertaining work of fiction -- a well done mockumentary.
The "documentary" you mention is a highly entertaining work of fiction -- a well done mockumentary.
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tomthemacman said:
nothing amplifies light.
Greg Lowry
Carbonite Member
tomthemacman, you're just repeating misinformation and throwing in a bit of your own. Do you actually read the other posts before you comment?
This whole radioactive thing isn't such a big deal. It's probably just thorium (used in a lot of lenses in the 1970s) which is barely radioactive at all, at least in the amounts that were used. The bigger issue is that it causes lenses to grow yellow with age.
I have an old 35mm f1.4 nikkor that has thorium glass in it, by the way. They're not too hard to find on ebay. I very much doubt anyone special had to supervise the shoot.
I think Canon made an f0.95 50mm lens way back in the day or something and nikon made a 50mm f1.1.
By the way:
QUESTION: Now we come to the scenes which have caused more comment than anything else in this overall beautiful film - namely the candlelight scenes. Can you tell me about these and how they were executed?
ALCOTT: The objective was to shoot these scenes exclusively by candlelight - that is, without a boost from any artificial light whatsoever. As I mentioned earlier, Stanley Kubrick and I had been discussing this possibility for years, but had not been able to find sufficiently fast lenses to do it. Stanley finally discovered three 50mm f/0.7 Zeiss still-camera lenses which were left over from a batch made for use by NASA in their Apollo moon-landing program. We had a non-reflexed Mitchell BNC which was sent over to Ed DiGiulio to be reconstructed to accept this ultra-fast lens. He had to mill out the existing lens mounts, because the rear element of this f/0.7 lens was virtually something like 4mm from the film plane. It took quite a while, and when we got the camera back we made quite extensive tests on it. This Zeiss lens was like no other lens in a way, because when you look through any normal type of lens, like the Panavision T/1.1 or the Angenieux f/0.95, you are looking through the optical system and by just altering the focus you can tell whether it's in or out of focus. But when you looked through this lens it appeared to have a fantastic range of focus, quite unbelievable. However, when you did a photographic test you discovered that it had no depth of field at all - which one expected anyway. So we literally had to scale this lens by doing hand tests from about 200 feet down to about 4 feet, marking every distance that would lead up to the 10-foot range. We had to literally get it down to inches on the actual scaling.
QUESTION: You say that the focal length was 50mm?
ALCOTT: It was 50mm, but then we acquired a projection lens of the reduction type, which Ed DiGiulio fitted over another 50mm lens to give us a 36.5mm lens for wider-angle coverage. The original 50mm lens was used for virtually all the medium shots and close shots.
QUESTION: And those scenes were illuminated entirely by candlelight?
ALCOTT: Entirely by the candles. In the sequence where Lord Ludd and Barry are in the gaming room and he loses a large amount of money, the set was lit entirely by the candles, but I had metal reflectors made to mount above the two chandeliers, the main purpose being to keep the heat of the candles from damaging the ceiling. However, it also acted as a light reflector to provide an overall illumination of toplight.
QUESTION: How many foot-candles (no pun intended) would you say you were using in that case?
ALCOTT: Roughly, three foot-candles was the key. We were forcing the whole picture one stop in development. Incidentally, I found a great advantage in using the Gossen Panalux electronic meter for these sequences, because it goes down to half foot-candle measurements. It's a very good meter for those extreme low-light situations. We were using 70-candle chandeliers, and most of the time I could also use either five-candle or three-candle table candelabra, as well. We actually went for a burnt-out effect, a very high key on the faces themselves.
QUESTION: What were some of the other problems attendant to using this ultra-fast lens to shoot entirely by candlelight?
ALCOTT: There was, first of all, the problem of finding a side viewfinder that would transmit enough light to show us where we were framed. The conventional viewfinder would not do at all, because it involves prisms which cause such a high degree of light loss that very little image is visible at such low light levels. Instead, we had to adapt to the BNC a viewfinder from one of the old Technicolor three-strip cameras. It works on a principle of mirrors and simply reflects what it "sees", resulting in a much brighter image. There is very little parallax with that viewfinder, since it mounts so close to the lens.
QUESTION: What about the depth of field problem?
ALCOTT: As I suggested before, that was indeed a problem. The point of focus was so critical and there was hardly any depth of field with that f/0.7 lens. My focus operator, Doug Milsome, used a closed-circuit video camera as the only way to keep track of the distances with any degree of accuracy. The video camera was placed at a 90-degree angle to the film camera position and was monitored by means of a TV screen mounted above the camera lens scale. A grid was placed over the TV screen and by taping the various artists' positions, the distances could be transferred to the TV grid to allow the artists a certain flexibility of movement, while keeping them in focus.
It was a very tricky operation, but according to all reports, it worked out quite satisfactorily.
Also pretty cool:
I have an old 35mm f1.4 nikkor that has thorium glass in it, by the way. They're not too hard to find on ebay. I very much doubt anyone special had to supervise the shoot.
I think Canon made an f0.95 50mm lens way back in the day or something and nikon made a 50mm f1.1.
By the way:
QUESTION: Now we come to the scenes which have caused more comment than anything else in this overall beautiful film - namely the candlelight scenes. Can you tell me about these and how they were executed?
ALCOTT: The objective was to shoot these scenes exclusively by candlelight - that is, without a boost from any artificial light whatsoever. As I mentioned earlier, Stanley Kubrick and I had been discussing this possibility for years, but had not been able to find sufficiently fast lenses to do it. Stanley finally discovered three 50mm f/0.7 Zeiss still-camera lenses which were left over from a batch made for use by NASA in their Apollo moon-landing program. We had a non-reflexed Mitchell BNC which was sent over to Ed DiGiulio to be reconstructed to accept this ultra-fast lens. He had to mill out the existing lens mounts, because the rear element of this f/0.7 lens was virtually something like 4mm from the film plane. It took quite a while, and when we got the camera back we made quite extensive tests on it. This Zeiss lens was like no other lens in a way, because when you look through any normal type of lens, like the Panavision T/1.1 or the Angenieux f/0.95, you are looking through the optical system and by just altering the focus you can tell whether it's in or out of focus. But when you looked through this lens it appeared to have a fantastic range of focus, quite unbelievable. However, when you did a photographic test you discovered that it had no depth of field at all - which one expected anyway. So we literally had to scale this lens by doing hand tests from about 200 feet down to about 4 feet, marking every distance that would lead up to the 10-foot range. We had to literally get it down to inches on the actual scaling.
QUESTION: You say that the focal length was 50mm?
ALCOTT: It was 50mm, but then we acquired a projection lens of the reduction type, which Ed DiGiulio fitted over another 50mm lens to give us a 36.5mm lens for wider-angle coverage. The original 50mm lens was used for virtually all the medium shots and close shots.
QUESTION: And those scenes were illuminated entirely by candlelight?
ALCOTT: Entirely by the candles. In the sequence where Lord Ludd and Barry are in the gaming room and he loses a large amount of money, the set was lit entirely by the candles, but I had metal reflectors made to mount above the two chandeliers, the main purpose being to keep the heat of the candles from damaging the ceiling. However, it also acted as a light reflector to provide an overall illumination of toplight.
QUESTION: How many foot-candles (no pun intended) would you say you were using in that case?
ALCOTT: Roughly, three foot-candles was the key. We were forcing the whole picture one stop in development. Incidentally, I found a great advantage in using the Gossen Panalux electronic meter for these sequences, because it goes down to half foot-candle measurements. It's a very good meter for those extreme low-light situations. We were using 70-candle chandeliers, and most of the time I could also use either five-candle or three-candle table candelabra, as well. We actually went for a burnt-out effect, a very high key on the faces themselves.
QUESTION: What were some of the other problems attendant to using this ultra-fast lens to shoot entirely by candlelight?
ALCOTT: There was, first of all, the problem of finding a side viewfinder that would transmit enough light to show us where we were framed. The conventional viewfinder would not do at all, because it involves prisms which cause such a high degree of light loss that very little image is visible at such low light levels. Instead, we had to adapt to the BNC a viewfinder from one of the old Technicolor three-strip cameras. It works on a principle of mirrors and simply reflects what it "sees", resulting in a much brighter image. There is very little parallax with that viewfinder, since it mounts so close to the lens.
QUESTION: What about the depth of field problem?
ALCOTT: As I suggested before, that was indeed a problem. The point of focus was so critical and there was hardly any depth of field with that f/0.7 lens. My focus operator, Doug Milsome, used a closed-circuit video camera as the only way to keep track of the distances with any degree of accuracy. The video camera was placed at a 90-degree angle to the film camera position and was monitored by means of a TV screen mounted above the camera lens scale. A grid was placed over the TV screen and by taping the various artists' positions, the distances could be transferred to the TV grid to allow the artists a certain flexibility of movement, while keeping them in focus.
It was a very tricky operation, but according to all reports, it worked out quite satisfactorily.
Also pretty cool:
Greg Lowry
Carbonite Member
Thanks for posting the American Cinematographer article. It confirms everything I've previously posted on the subject of the Zeiss 0.7 lenses.
I had a 16mm format 25mm f0.95 Angenieux way back in the early 70s. Not the most fantastic lens in terms of resolution, but even with the 100 ASA film of that era I could shoot in near-darkness.
I had a 16mm format 25mm f0.95 Angenieux way back in the early 70s. Not the most fantastic lens in terms of resolution, but even with the 100 ASA film of that era I could shoot in near-darkness.
i just got a nerd boner......