You Should Want What Makes You Happy
Seriously, you should want what makes you happy, but not what you think makes you happy, because someone else tells you so.
Cinema lenses are a real case in point.
The very best cinema lenses, which cost about as much as a decent car, are all flawed by still photography standards.
Because in some situations, flaws are good*.
Technical perfection is technical perfection. It is not visual perfection for every possible situation or viewer.
The same with auto focus and other auto features. Creativity often hides in the imperfect, so mitigations, when used, need to take that into account.
An auto focussed, gimbal stabilised, clinically sharp and perfectly colour balanced clip looks…….. clinical and process-obvious. By process-obvious I mean the process itself becomes the exemplar. It is so sharp, so perfectly lit, so clean, that it makes you the viewer, aware of that.
This is a still image I recently inserted into a video project. The video was good quality, clean, bright and colourful, but the stills all jangled a bit looking much snappier than the video. They were just too sharp, too contrasty. (EM1 MkII, 45mm at f2), just how I like my stills, but not my video.
This often takes you out of the immersive space you and the film maker need you to be in to buy into their world over your own.
This version of the still image was edited to be closer to the video and it fit in much better. I used several sliders in ways I would never use for stills. The softening simulates the way we see. The secret sauce of stills photography is the “frozen” nature of it, allowing you to see all that fine detail. Video does not need that.
As soon as you are aware of the process, the process has failed.
“Organic” is often the word used to describe imperfect but attractive footage, “invisible” could be another.
Having said that, this can go too far also. I caught out of the corner of my eye the other day an old episode of NCIS or JAG, in all its double strength-soft filter glory. Too much.
The other day I was looking for samples of the 12-60 Leica lens used in video and I found a very good clip shot on a GH5 and graded to perfection. It was so sharp, it appealed to the stills shooter in me, but after a half minute it repelled the videographer. I was transfixed by the technical quality, but that state ruined the film maker’s intent.
They did not compel me, they lost me to awareness of process.
Interestingly, my wife also responded on a more emotional level, commenting “it’s too hard looking”.
To this end, that perfection that we can all too easily find, is being degraded intentionally.
Filters, legacy lenses, creative grading and cinema lenses are all ways of taking the edge out of video footage and put the natural feel back in.
*I just bought some cheap (read super cheap) cinema lenses for my S5. I paid into the need for a different look, something magical and “organic”. I will test all my 50mm lenses tomorrow and see if modern stills, legacy stills, cinema or super budget lenses make a difference to the base look of a stills image and if that will translate into footage.