I just watched a really fun video on using miniatures in movie making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj65jTCq1Rs
All was going swimmingly until the presenter, a nice enough guy and well presented failed to use the right terminology when describing perspective and depth of field.
He said there were three things that effect depth of field (did not use the term, falling back on “how much is in focus” and similar).
The length of lens you use.
2. The distance to the subject.
These are part of the story, but magnification, perspective and distance to subject are intertwined. Other related elements were not explained like the distance of the subject to its background and the lenses used in the example were a long tele and a standard, but were called a “long” and “wide” lens. The example used a long lens for the model and wide lens for the real car, so apples and oranges.
3. How much light you let in.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! Aperture selection does affect focus depth (depth of field), but its relationship to light transmission is coincidental, not at all directly connected. Less light does not automatically mean more depth of field, it is just a probable by-product. Aperture is also connected to format, which changes magnification and perspective (see above).
This was shot with a 9mm lens on a M43 camera at about f4. It has shallow depth of field due to its closeness to the subject (about 2”), but deeper depth than a longer lens because of stretched perspective and less magnification (super wide lens).
Looking at the examples shown in the video, I got where he was going thanks mostly to being able to fill in the blanks, but I was worried again that misleading terminology used by well watched presenters (12m followers), is breaking the reality of, well..… reality.
Little things, like the extreme nature of the examples used railroad the viewer into thinking there are no other options.
For example in most of the Wes Anderson examples, they actually use longer lenses, but they are anamorphic formats, so they are also wide looking**.
Compression, a small aperture (which is a big number) with resulting deep depth of field and careful focus, slightly forward of middle, caught this image of 80 odd feet of skate park jumps and walls, all with a long lens.
Perspective and depth of field cover all of the above, but at no point were these two terms used correctly or in context. Ok, that is fine and you can get the job done without, but it is a little like talking car performance without using terms like revs, torque or acceleration and replacing them with words like “vroom-vroom” and “grunt”.
It seemed to indicate a lack of technical understanding on the presenters part although they did seem to get the ideas behind their misleading statements, just not the math. Ironically, if they did use the correct terms, the whole thing would have been quicker and cleaner.
This is not just a terminology thing like “Bokeh”, it is science, with rules.
The science is in terms like shallow depth, wide aperture, compression, close focus, thin plane of focus. Bokeh is a subjective term for the “prettiness” of the blurring.
The big problem is of course, that even if the terminology does change over time to suit the ever flexible English language, it needs to be consistent otherwise the real terminology is lost and replaced by a chaos of substitutes.
Try going into a math class and convincing the lecturer you are using the “new” term for logarithmic algorithms “lalgies” and see how far you get.
One thing that is a common thread is the gap in technical awareness I am seeing between emerging stills shooters and videographers and this is something I have eluded to before.
Stills shooters are following in the steps of an unbroken line of immediate predecessors. Many working professionals are in their forties and fifties, but are staying up with current trends, blending seamlessly in with the younger crew, even adapting to video as they go.
I cannot think of many main stream videographers, apart from the cinema masters, who are over forty. Videographers have a thinner thread to follow so tend to be younger and largely self taught, so are parroting similar experts. They are staying within their known sphere of interest and that has its own problems.
I have several times watched “best lens for X” videos and had no luck determining what format the expert reviewer is referencing. One video, so bad I did not even bother bookmarking it, switched between formats freely without any qualification which made the whole video effectively pointless.
Using another car analogy, it is like talking about engine cylinders as a measure of power without qualifying what size the engine is or what it is used for. A twelve cylinder model plane engine will not have the grunt of a Harley two stroke, but it may go faster.
So what if cinematographer “A” uses a 40mm most of the time. If you do not tell us what format of camera they use*, you do not know if that is effectively a super wide (IMax), standard wide (Full Frame), standard long (Super-35) or short telephoto (M43) and that is before anamorphic formats (various) come into play.
The reality is most older cinematographers used Super-35 format (35mm film, but turned sideways), most modern content creators use M43, APS-C or Full Frame and it makes a difference.
Go in to any camera store and the chances are the senior photographic or video/photo sales expert will be older, male or female and probably not shooting Sony.
Ask to talk to the video expert and in all likelihood you will meet a sub-thirty male Sony shooter. Not generalising here, just going with what I know to be true based on personal experience and what I see online over and over.
There are exceptions, but they run against the flow.
*Super 35 it turned out, so a long standard, but it took some tracking down.
**In anamorphic formats, the lens determines the magnification of the height of the image, like any other lens, but the width is determined by the “squeeze” factor which may be anything from 25% to 300% wider. For example a 50mm lens on a 1.33x squeeze full frame format is a 50mm from bottom to top, but covers an area similar to a 35mm lens (33% more) in width or from side to side.