Surprise, surprise

Surprise, surprise

I was exploring the idea of ‘glimpses’ with Amber Belle, and had taken along a couple of long, manual focus lenses – I’ll say a little bit about the two of them first.

My 100mm Canon f/3.5 is an old lens – I reckon it dates from about 1960. It’s a narrow alloy tube, with a lashed-up lens hood that the previous owner, my good friend Fred Whisker. It’s Leica screw fitting, and I attach it to my camera with a pair of adaptors – a cheap Leica bayonet to Sony FE (black, from China) and a rather expensive Leitz screw-bayonet adaptor.

The Canon lens is actually impressively sharp, but the contrast is very low, and has massive susceptibility to flare. It also gives a very cold image – it would have been very disappointing on colour slide film, needing a heavy colour correction filter. But on video, colour correction is easy, and Levels allows fine-tuning the image tones, leaving a lovely soft-looking image that models love. It’s very flattering.



The other lens is a Samyang 135mm f/2 manual focus lens, designed for Sony cameras. It’s a modern design, and has the same sort of characteristics as the Sigma and Sony f/1.8 offerings, but at a fraction of the price. It’s not AF: so it’s slow to use, and it isn’t quite as good – but value for money is stellar. Completely different from the Canon, it gives a precise, hard-drawn image with excellent contrast. And it’s big and heavy, and the physically longest 135mm I’ve ever used.

I’d been shooting with the Canon, and decided to change the look. Imagine my surprise when the image was again ethereal and misty. It took me a couple of frames to think ‘there’s something odd going on’ and actually look at the lens.

Simple, really: the lens had been cold in the boot of my car, and had misted up completely in a warm room. So a classic trick: breathe on the lens and shoot at once for an ad hoc misty look. And keep your lenses warm if you want to retain the full contrast and definition that you’ve paid for!