Research: Cross-Polarisation

Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting with Cross-Polarisation, a photographic technique which allows for transparent objects to be illuminated and captured while hiding the light source. For this effect to work, the object needs to be placed in between two polarisers, one in front of the light source, the other in front of the lens. An intervalometer was used to create a time-lapse of ice melting. A 300 LED video light, covered with a sheet of polarising material, as well as a Canon EOS 5D Mark III with 24-105mm F/4.0 L IS lens and Hoya HD Circular Polarising filter were used.

(Video coming back soon!)

In order to further look into the possibilities of using Cross-Polarisation as a technique for a project, a series of photographs were taken. The same equipment was used as before: 300 LED video light, covered with a sheet of polarising material, as well as a Canon EOS 5D Mark III with 24-105mm F/4.0 L IS lens and Hoya HD Circular Polarising filter. The test video of a transparent plastic cup was shot on a Blackmagic Cinema Camera in ProRes Film Log, using a Carl Zeiss Jena 35mm F/2.4 M42 Screw-Mount lens, M42-EOS mount adapter and Vivitar Circular Polarising filter.

Due to the comparatively small size of the video light, the size of the objects captured as well as the camera angles used, were very restricted. A light box, usually used for tracing, would be more suitable as it would provide a larger area that is evenly lit.

Research: Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 Infinity Focus Adjustment

Focus Adjustment 1

WARNING: I ASSUME NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MAY CAUSE TO YOUR LENS WHEN DOING THIS MODIFICATION. IF YOU PROCEED, YOU ARE DOING IT AT YOUR OWN RISK! THE LENS MODIFIED WAS A NIKON MOUNT VERSION.

Focus Adjustment 2

1) Gently remove the rubber on the focus ring using a bent paper clip. With your fingers, gently pull the rubber ring towards the back of the lens e.g. on top of the zoom ring. Try not to pull to hard and move the rubber ring bit by bit to avoid stressing the rubber.

2) Moving the rubber on the focus ring reveals a line of thin black tape. Remove it making sure not to damage it, as you will need to reapply the tape later.

3) Removing the tape reveals that the focus ring is actually divided into two parts. Pull down the lower part. It should come off and you should be able to temporarily slide this lower part on top of the lens body just below, covering the Tokina logo and distance meter, as it is shown in the image below. Make sure not to scratch the lens body when doing this. Leave the screws with the golden outline where they are, these are not the ones to adjust!

4) After separating the two parts of the focus ring, you need to make sure that for the next step, the upper part of the focus ring is pushed upwards (as if you were shooting in AF mode). 3 recessed screws should now be visible. By default, the three screw holes were in the middle of the oval adjustment holes (see image of the oval below). Remove the three screws and adjust the ring by pushing the screw holes to the right hand side (front of the lens facing forward). I used a small screw driver to do this. Pushing one of the screw holes will move the other two as well, as an inner part of the lens is being rotated. It might be hard to move at first. I had to move it back and forth a bit. However, make sure not to move the screw holes too far, so you can’t reach them!

NOTE: THIS MODIFICATION WAS DONE TO A NIKON MOUNT TOKINA 11-16MM F/2.8 LENS. IF YOU HAVE THE CANON MOUNT VERSION, THIS MODIFICATION MAY STILL WORK, BUT FOCUS RINGS ON CANON LENSES ROTATE THE OTHER WAY AROUND, SO IT IS POSSIBLE THAT ON THE CANON MOUNT VERSION, THE 3 SCREW HOLES WOULD HAVE TO BE MOVED TOWARDS THE VERY LEFT OF THE OVAL HOLES, RATHER THAN THE VERY RIGHT.

5) Once you have managed to move the screw holes to the right hand side of the oval, put all three screws back into their holes and reassemble the lens. Move the lower part of the focus ring back into its place, reapply the tape and put the rubber grip back over the focus ring.

Research: Shooting on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera Part 1

After losing hope to be able to shoot Malaise at Beelitz-Heilstätte on a Blackmagic Cinema Camera due to slow production, I was able to acquire it through someone who was one of the first to pre-order the camera after Blackmagic Design announced it back in April 2012. I will now be able to shoot the hospital as I intended, recording in 2.5k RAW digital video.

In preparation for the shoot at Beelitz-Heilstätte, I have started testing the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. I live on the 7th floor of a building in East London and there is currently some scaffolding that was put up to change the windows. It snowed all day in London today, so I decided to climb out my window and take my tripod and Blackmagic Cinema Camera out there to take some test shots in these harsh lighting conditions.

The lens used for the test was a Carl Zeiss 180mm F2.8 M42 screw mount lens, which I mounted onto the camera using an M42 to EF mount adapter. I stopped the lens down to F/5.6 and set the camera to a frame rate of 25fps, a 180 degree shutter angle, and a white balance of 5600K (Daylight). Even though it was very bright outside, an ND filter was not used. As it turns out, it is not necessary when shooting RAW on the Black Magic Cinema Camera, as there is more than enough dynamic range and colour information to make adjustments in post. The images below are an example of how much information one can pull back into the frames. The fast diagonally falling snow alone would have made a big mess with compression artefacts on 8-bit h.264 DSLR footage.

Overall, shooting on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera will take some getting used to, as the camera handling and the post-production of its footage is more complex, but offers many more colour grading possibilities than compressed footage in return. When shooting RAW with this camera, it is better to overexpose and pull detail out of the highlights, as shown in the example frame below, than underexposing and trying to pull detail out of the shadows. When setting the exposure on the lens, turning on the Zebras feature set to 100% will show on the camera’s LCD at which point highlights are clipped as the image becomes “too overexposed”. Making sure that there are no zebra lines visible ensures that enough detail is retained to work with in post.

BMCC RAW Ungraded Above: JPEG of the DNG file (as shot)

BMCC RAW Corrected Above: JPEG of the DNG file (Exposure corrected)

BMCC RAW Warm Grade Above: JPEG of the DNG file (Warm grade)

BMCC RAW Cold Grade Above: JPEG of the DNG file (Cold grade)

Download the DNG file

Work in Progress: Makeshift Queen Alexandra’s House

Queen Alexandra’s House is a hall of residence built in 1884 for female students studying in London.

“Just behind the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington Gore, the Well-Manicured Man (John Neville) attends the meeting of the elders in Rob Bowman’s big screen version of The X-Files. The interior of the building seen in the film, though, is the Athenaeum. No, not London’s venerable gentlemen’s club. This is an American movie, and this Athenaeum is the dining room of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.” (Source)

“(…) when he’s summoned to attend the meeting of elders, that really is London. The entrance is Queen Alexandra’s House, Kensington Gore, SW7, alongside the Albert Hall in Kensington (which you might recognise as the home of Control (John Hurt) in the 2011 film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy)” (Source)

This shot was taken on a Canon EOS 5D Mark III using a Canon EF 24-105mm F/4.0 L IS lens at 58mm focal length, an aperture of F/4.0, a shutter speed of 1/10 second, and an ISO of 6400. I used available street lighting and waited for a car to drive by, providing me with additional partial lighting of the pavement and steps towards the entrance.

Queen Alexandra's House

Research: Techniscope, UltraPan8 and Lomokino Part 1

Researching wide-screen alternatives to using anamorphic lenses, I came across Techniscope, otherwise known as 2-perf, an old film format that provides a wide aspect ratio image while saving film, therefore being mostly used for low-budget productions. Back in 1968, Roger Ebert wrote about the film “Counterpoint”, stating that, “The movie is shot in Techniscope, a process designed to give a wide-screen picture while saving film and avoiding payment of royalties to the patented processes like Panavision. In this film, as in “Harry Frigg,” Techniscope causes washed-out color and a loss of detail. Universal shouldn’t be so cheap.” (Source) The film format was used between the 1960s and 1980s, after which it was abandoned due to the low-quality output, as the spherically shot frames had to be anamorphised and enlarged to be projected on regular anamorphic projectors. However, Techniscope made a comeback and was used for the underwater scenes in Titanic (1997) and slow-motion scenes in Panic Room (2002). If the film is scanned in digitally, the process of anamorphising and enlarging the frames is unnecessary, leading to higher quality reproductions.

Techniscope

In 2011, Nicholas Kovats achieved a modification to his Bolex H8/H16 cameras, which allowed him to record native 2.8:1 aspect ratio spherical ultrawide frames onto Regular 8mm film. Kovats calls this format UltraPan8.

http://vimeo.com/36944151

In Late 2011, The Lomographic Society announced the Lomokino camera:

Lomokino

Film type: 35mm
Exposure area: 24mm x 8.5mm
Frame rate: Approximately 3-5 frames per second
Focal length: 25mm
Angle of view: 54 degrees
Aperture: f/5.6, f/8, f/11 (Continuous aperture)
Shutter speed: 1/100
Focusing: 1m ~ infinity & 0.6m (close-up button)
Viewfinder: Inverse-Galileo foldable viewfinder
Flash sync: X-Sync (Hot-shoe)
Tripod mount: Standard 1/4″ tripod screw
Shoots identical UltraPan8 aspect ratio = 2.8:1

Lomokino frame size

The Lomokino camera is able to fit 144 frames onto one 36 exposure roll of standard 35mm film for still photography use by splitting up each exposure into 4 frames. In doing so, the resulting images are cropped to a wide aspect ratio. As it turns out, their frame size of 24 x 8.5mm is close to that of the Techniscope format, which is 22 x 9.47 mm.

Frames per 24 exposure roll: 24×4 = 96 frames
Frames per 36 exposure roll: 36×4 = 144 frames

Lomokino frame rate

The Lomokino camera features a hand crank and the frame rate is determined by the speed at which it is turned. In Lomography’s official documentation of the product a frame rate of 3-5fps is stated. In order to achieve higher frame rates the hand crank would need to be replaced with a motorised solution. Researching if such a modification had been attempted before, I came across a blog post on the Lomography website describing the use of a drill as a motor for the camera.

The following calculations show the drill speed in rotations per minute needed for frame rates 16, 18, 24, and 25. However, as the Lomokino is made of plastic, the shutter and other internal components may not withstand running film through the camera at such high speeds. 18fps has been achieved before using the drill method, but 24fps or 25fps may be too much for the mechanism to handle.

(16:2) x 60 = 480rpm drill needed
(18:2) x 60 = 540rpm drill needed
(24:2) x 60 = 720rpm drill needed
(25:2) x 60 = 750rpm drill needed

Lomokino film length

Since the Lomokino camera divides each exposure into 4 frames, the resulting film length of a 24 exposure roll shot at 24fps would be 96 frames / 24 = 4 seconds. Shooting at 24fps on a 36 exposure film roll, the 144 frames available / 24 = 6 seconds. 4 or 6 seconds of film length may not seem like much, but if the shots are pre-planned, the editing process could be eliminated by sticking to 4 or 6 second shots using 24 and 36 exposure rolls of the same film type accordingly. Personally, since I still have a lot of 24 exposure rolls of Kodak ColorPlus 200 film, I will stick with these for now, limiting my first test shots to only 4 seconds. One film I would like to try if the modification works is the Agfa APX 100 Black & White film.

Links

Lomography Shop London, Film Processing Price List

Thread about the Lomokino camera on Cinematography.com

Failed lens upgrade attempts

Research: Los Angeles Plays Itself Thom Andersen, 2003

I came across Los Angeles Plays Itself by Thom Andersen today, a video essay about the depiction and misportrayal of the city of Los Angeles through movies. As I have only been to Los Angeles briefly when I was younger, I can only relate to his views on the representation of locations in general.

“Of course, I know movies aren’t about places, they’re about stories. If we notice the location, we are not really watching the movie. It’s what’s up front that counts. Movies bury their traces, choosing for us what to watch, then moving on to something else. They do the work of our voluntary attention, and so we must suppress that faculty as we watch. Our involuntary attention must come to the fore. But what if we watch with our voluntary attention, instead of letting the movies direct us? If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations.” (Source)

“In a city where only a few buildings are more than a hundred years old, where most traces of the city’s history have been effaced, a place can become a historic landmark because it was once a movie location. As it is for people, so it is for places: getting into the movies becomes a substitute for achievement. Actors have head shots, buildings get architectural photographs.” (Source)

“(…) I don’t like geographic license. It’s hard to make a theoretical argument against it. After all, in a fiction film, a real space becomes fictional. Why shouldn’t a car chase jump from the Venice canals to the Los Angeles harbor thirty miles away? Why shouldn’t the exit from a skating rink in Westwood open directly onto Fletcher Bowron Square in downtown Los Angeles, fifteen miles east? But one fiction is not always as good as another, and like dramatic license, geographic license is usually an alibi for laziness. Silly geography makes for silly movies.” (Source)