Anamorphic lenses for stills

[Hilmersen]

Any of you that use anamorphic lenses for stills? Just startet to look into it, and it seems kind of cool. Does any you have experice with it? What are the pro and cons? Do you have example images?

 

[santino]

Pros: shallow dof with wide angle.
Cons: expensive, slightly worse image quality.

 

[Rob-F]

(+) It's a good way to achieve a wide aspect ratio without cropping, wasting film area.
(-) When the focus is on the foreground, the background appears oddly stretched, vertically. Circles become vertical ovals. Apparent in movies when focus changes!

I'd enjoy reading comments on equipment that members have tried and their experiences, lessons learned!

Of course, it really calls for SLR gear; not rangefinders!

Edit: That vertical elongation is very evident in a scene in "The Hunt for Red October," inside the submarine, when the focus is pulled from background to foreground.

 

[joe bosak]

I keep coming back to this notion but it always seem impractical for various reasons.

Most anamorphic adapters are pretty heavy and usually have a fairly crude way to attach them to your taking lens, plus depending on what you go for you may have extra focusing aids (more weight and complexity). But Sirui do a cheap-ish range of anamorphic lenses for various modern mounts and the SLR Magic adapters are "reasonably" practical.

The other issue is vignetting with the adapters: they work best with telephoto, which is fine if that's what you want, for example 50mm on APS-C or m43, or 85mm+ on full frame. There are calculators out there (eg by T Ferradans) to estimate whether a given lens/adapter will vignette.

 

[boojum]

Yes, they use the whole "negative" whether it is analog(ue) or digital. But they have to be decoded to get the "squish" out. The other, more practical, option is the 16x9 format offered in some cameras as a built-in crop. This eliminates the expensive anamorphic lens purchase and all that nasty decoding of the shot after.

There are some inexpensive Sony mounts at B&H but there is that post edit overhead that must be dealt with. So my question is the lens expense and post edit effort worth not using what is available as a crop in some cameras?

FWIW I am shooting 16x9 when offered in a camera I have. And it is, of course, cropped to that.

 

[jaredangle]

Any of you that use anamorphic lenses for stills? Just startet to look into it, and it seems kind of cool. Does any you have experice with it? What are the pro and cons? Do you have example images?

I've seen someone using the 33mm Blazer Remus (1.5x anamorphic) on a PL to M-mount adapter on a Leica M11. Not sure what software they were using for desqueeze, and I never saw any photos produced using that setup, just photos of the gear.

 

[MikeL]

I run a Iscorama Pre-36 on a Nikon 50mm sometimes, mostly for video.
From a Sony I send photos to my ipad.
On the ipad I select the photos in an app called Desqueeze, it spits them out desqueezed.
Once you choose the right conversion ratio, it couldn’t be easier.

 

[Rust]

I use Blazar Nero 1.5x anamorphic adapter. Jupiter-8 50mm f2, Sony A7S. Graded in Davinci Resolve.

 

[Rust]

Blazar Nero 1.5x, Jupiter-8 50mm f2, Sony A7S.

 

[shawn]

Yes, they use the whole "negative" whether it is analog(ue) or digital. But they have to be decoded to get the "squish" out. The other, more practical, option is the 16x9 format offered in some cameras as a built-in crop. This eliminates the expensive anamorphic lens purchase and all that nasty decoding of the shot after.

There are some inexpensive Sony mounts at B&H but there is that post edit overhead that must be dealt with. So my question is the lens expense and post edit effort worth not using what is available as a crop in some cameras?

FWIW I am shooting 16x9 when offered in a camera I have. And it is, of course, cropped to that.

Some cameras also offer 2:1, 21:9 or 65:24 crop as well. The post edit overhead for an anamorphic stills might have a fairly simple solution. I have read if you convert the raw to DNG you can then use exif tool to change one field and programs like lightroom will handle the desqueeze. Also wondering if a lens profile could be made to desqueeze. They exist to defish, so maybe?

I am going to be trying out a Sirui 35mm anamorphic lens, mainly for video but I will also try stills with it. And compared the 35mm anamorphic vs the rough equivalent through one of the crop modes. The anamorphic will of course be higher resolution but there will be differences in DOF and the look of the out of focus area too along with flare and sharpness of the anamorphic lens.

Here is a sample video of someone shooting stills with the anamorphic.

 

[boojum]

Some cameras also offer 2:1, 21:9 or 65:24 crop as well. The post edit overhead for an anamorphic stills might have a fairly simple solution. I have read if you convert the raw to DNG you can then use exif tool to change one field and programs like lightroom will handle the desqueeze. Also wondering if a lens profile could be made to desqueeze. They exist to defish, so maybe?

I am going to be trying out a Sirui 35mm anamorphic lens, mainly for video but I will also try stills with it. And compared the 35mm anamorphic vs the rough equivalent through one of the crop modes. The anamorphic will of course be higher resolution but there will be differences in DOF and the look of the out of focus area too along with flare and sharpness of the anamorphic lens.

Here is a sample video of someone shooting stills with the anamorphic.

Yes, some cameras do offer the wide formats via crop of sensor. The X2D offers 65:24 and I have fooled with it. It is nice.

This first is a view of the Columbia River on a typical sunny day here. The second is of the Crema Coffee House on Arkeny at a PDX get-together for camera nerds. I like the effect.

B0002113 by West Phalia, on Flickr

B0002129 by West Phalia, on Flickr

 

[boojum]

This is a recent shot of Haystack Rock down in Cannon Beach, a local landmark and a shot down the coast from a state park towards Haystack Rock. Both in 16:9 in camera crop.

L1000176 by West Phalia, on Flickr

L1000170 by West Phalia, on Flickr

 

[jbielikowski]

I'm first in line to use anamorphic lenses but no camera maker provide desqueeze enabled for photography, switch to video mode and bam, no problem. I talked recently with some Canon and Leica reps, it's a matter of simple firmware update, but I think I was the only one pushing them for such feature. Of course you can shoot without it, with ~1.5x it's not really a problem, but I'd rather wait for them to respond to customer feedback.

Plus there is a thing called Panomicron Panomicron and I was super excited to use it on a rangefinder, but unfortunately there is a focus shift, my analog anamorphic plans were ruined. I even wanted to try to mount it on a enlarger lens to desqueeze straight on to paper.

 

[boojum]

Now anamorphic lenses require sacrifice. You either have to play with the de-squishers or lose the top and bottom of your sensor in a crop. There are a few film Xpans around but rare, expensive and expensive to maintain. It is a pay-to-play deal, de-squishers and squishers or able cameras. Money either way. If the Panomicron can work well without damaging images it is a good option. I sure will follow with interest and Panomicron experimentation. It looks exciting.

 

[shawn]

Now anamorphic lenses require sacrifice. You either have to play with the de-squishers or lose the top and bottom of your sensor in a crop. There are a few film Xpans around but rare, expensive and expensive to maintain. It is a pay-to-play deal, de-squishers and squishers or able cameras. Money either way. If the Panomicron can work well without damaging images it is a good option. I sure will follow within interest and Panomicron experimentation. It looks exciting.

Just tried the exiftool command and lightroom did apply the horizontal scale which should desquish an anamorphic photo. The resulting imported photo in Lightoom had a 2.4:1 ratio which is what it should have given a 3:2 image with a 1.6x Anamorphic lens. I tested on a regular image and the resulting file was stretched horizontally.

Iridient also respected the EXIF. DXO Photolab 6, Affinity and Photos did not.

I used Adobe DNG converter on the raw files and then ran
exiftool -DefaultScale="1.6 1" *.dng

in the file location of the DNGs.

I should be able to test with an anamorphic lens tomorrow.

 

[boojum]

Looking forward to your tests. I wonder if ART can have its EXIF manipulated? Hmmm. If I wanted to do anamorphic on a FF Sony I would need that. I would go SLR or DSLR for this, RF is too dicey.

I am foolish with money in some places but cheap in others, like editors.

 

[Coldkennels]

...am I being an idiot and misunderstanding something, because it seems like something that should be relatively easy to do in Photoshop (or GIMP, or something similar)?

Taking one of @Rust's images, it's relatively simple to use the image size tool (Cmd+Alt+I) to re-squeeze it back down to 4:6 by just decoupling the width and height dimensions and changing just the width, like so:



If I'm understanding this correctly, there's no reason you couldn't do exactly the same thing in reverse to get to the intended final dimensions; all you'd need to know is the final width of the "de-squished" version of the image (obtained in this case by multiplying your starting width by 1.5058823529, apparently).

 

[boojum]

...am I being an idiot and misunderstanding something, because it seems like something that should be relatively easy to do in Photoshop (or GIMP, or something similar)?

Taking one of @Rust's images, it's relatively simple to use the image size tool (Cmd+Alt+I) to re-squeeze it back down to 4:6 by just decoupling the width and height dimensions and changing just the width, like so:

View attachment 4855390

If I'm understanding this correctly, there's no reason you couldn't do exactly the same thing in reverse to get to the intended final dimensions; all you'd need to know is the final width of the "de-squished" version of the image (obtained in this case by multiplying your starting width by 1.5058823529, apparently).

Good point! Go to the head of the class. ;o)

 

[shawn]

...am I being an idiot and misunderstanding something, because it seems like something that should be relatively easy to do in Photoshop (or GIMP, or something similar)?

Not being an idiot. Photoshop (or similar) is a typical way to desqueeze and setting up an action can make it a fairly quick process.

I wanted to see if it were possible to do it with my existing workflow. Almost all of my editing (probably 99% of all pictures) is in LR and it catalogs everything. I was trying to avoid putting anything anamorphic through photoshop and adding a bunch more storage with TIFFs. The conversion to DNG (which actually cuts file size due to lossless compression) and then the exif edit makes LR do the desqueese automatically so it fits right into my workflow with only a pre-process step.

 

[shawn]

Anamorphic arrived today just as the sun was going down so just quick test shots to see if the EXIF trick works properly with Lightroom. It does seem to work fine. For a full frame anamorphic lens it is tiny and light. I was shooting pretty close to wide open and it does get softer on the edges.Unfortunately the S1H doesn't let you use the monitor desqueeze function when shooting stills so you just have to kind of visualize the results ahead of time. Or switch to video mode to see the desqueeze then back to photo to take the shot.