However, at the same time, movie makers were trying to figure out how to get really long depth of field, in some cases inventing things like the split-focus diopter that focused differently on different sides of the frame, or even compositing two images together to get someone in focus in the foreground and someone else in focus in the background.Ī split-focus diopter was used in Robert Wise’ 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture to keep Persus Kambatta in focus on the left and William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy in focus on the right. Consumer and prosumer video cameras without interchangeable lenses didn’t have the apertures necessary for very shallow depth of field and for that reason, shallow depth of field is something that’s associated with high budget movies. Until recently, shallow depth of field was relegated to big motion pictures. Second: the size of your sensor doesn’t affect the depth of field, but again, like focal length, since it affects what you can fit on your screen, it influences your choice of focal lengths which affects the appearance of the depth of field. If this doesn’t make sense you can safely pretend that the longer the focal length the shallower the depth of field, just remember it only looks that way and don’t say it at parties where there are fancy cinematographers. The focal length does, however, affect how magnified the out of focus areas are in your frame, and it affects how far your subject needs to be away from your lens, so the magnification of the lens makes it appear that the background is more out of focus by giving it more screen space. Focal Lengthįirst: the focal length of the lens does not actually affect the depth of field. ( What!? Don’t fret, it’s not really that confusing.)īokeh doesn’t describe how out of focus the background is, only how nice it looks. There are two other things that don’t actually affect the depth of field, but they seem to. The closer the object is to the lens, and the wider the aperture, the shallower the depth of field. There are two factors that determine the depth of field: the aperture size, and the distance from the lens to the subject. The english word for “bokeh” is “bokeh” and among videographers, photographers and cinematographers, it’s commonly used.īokeh doesn’t describe how out of focus the background is, only how nice it looks. It’s sort of like saying “Godzilla” is a Japanese word describing a giant city-smashing monster that has no English equivalent. Searching the Internet you might learn that “bokeh” is a Japanese word for describing the out of focus areas in an image which has no English equivalent, but that’s actually wrong. It’s inevitable that the more you learn about a topic the more detail you see in things. What was he noticing in my shot that I wasn’t? And what was that word, “bokeh”? It sounds like a Sunday morning cartoon. He looked at it briefly, grunted and said “that’s some mighty funky bokeh you got going on there.” And went back to whatever he was doing. I once showed a veteran cameraman a shot I was particularly proud of. This article talks about what determines bokeh and what makes one type more pleasing than another. As your grasp of videography grows, you’ll start to understand how you can control emotion and design through the use of depth of field.
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