Introducing Leitner's Cinematography Corner

Editor's note: This is the first of D.W. Leitner's columns on cinematography. Check back each week for reviews, blogs, notes, and opinions from our longtime contributing editor, who is also an award-winning director, producer, and cinematographer of independent films showcased at film festivals like Sundance and Berlin. Check out Leitner's Cinematography Corner in its new home

Digital is not a cause. Not the shortcut some have made it out to be. It is a present-day means to innovation, that's all. Not an end in itself.

The Cinematography Corner will be my ongoing effort to steer discussion of new technology away from starry-eyed worship of all things digital and back to established filmmaking practices. We live in a solid-state world from which there's no turning back, but with these short entries I intend to build on a century of cinematographic art and craft rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s when documentaries and indie features were shot on 16mm, it was conventional for an Arri SR or Aaton owner to possess a basic lens package of two zooms plus a fast wide-angle prime lens. Typically this included a wide-angle Angénieux 9.5-57mm zoom, a longer Angénieux 12-120mm zoom, and a 5.9mm T/1.9 Angénieux prime or, later, 9.5mm T/1.3 Carl Zeiss Super Speed.

The reason for the wide-angle prime is obvious: to have a fast lens that can deliver a wider angle-of-view than either zoom can. But why two zooms?

No single zoom can be truly wide-angle at one end and truly telephoto at the other.

Now as then, wide-angle zoom design is an optical challenge, which is why they're less common and more expensive. But simply increasing zoom ratio is no solution either. A mild 3x zoom (sometimes called a "variable prime") will always yield higher-quality images at a faster aperture than a 10x zoom, which in turn will always outperform a 20x zoom. To bend these rules requires weight, size, and intricate design—i.e., use of fluorite elements, exotic glasses, and complex aspheric surfaces—which entails cost.

If you shoot documentaries, you need a wide-angle zoom for close coverage of people or large architectural interiors. If you shoot stage performances or sporting events, you also need a longer zoom for close-ups of faraway action.

Shooting 16mm in the early 1980s, the answer was a pair of zooms, as noted above. By the late 1980s, 2/3in. zooms for pro ENG camcorders got around this problem by incorporating a 2x extender, which was a built-in glass diopter (single lens element) flipped into the optical path at the rear of the zoom to double its focal lengths. Using the 2x extender, an 8.5-119mm ENG zoom became 17-238mm.

Convenient, no argument, but why didn't 2x extenders show up on 16mm zooms? Degraded optical performance, that's why—including loss of contrast, resolution, field evenness, and introduction of color fringing. Easily gotten away with in low-resolution NTSC, easily visible in higher-resolution 16mm and today's HD.

The popularity of inexpensive palm-supported HD camcorders, from Sony's HVR-Z1U onward, has unfortunately deprived newer camera operators of experience with interchangeable lens systems.

Which is why I gave a series of talks and demonstrations at DV Expo in Pasadena, Calif., in late September on the subject of interchangeable lens technique when using Sony's HVR-Z7U, the only 1/3in. palm-held camcorder that offers this traditional photographic functionality.

As in the days of 16mm, I discussed use of a longer zoom—the Zeiss 12x, 4.4-52.8mm, f/1.6, supplied with the Z7—paired with use of a wide-angle zoom, the Zeiss Vario-Sonnar 8x, 3.3-26.4mm, f/1.6 (slightly longer and heavier than the 4.4-52.8mm, due to complexity).

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Sony HVR-Z7U I use a lot of different cameras and camcorders, from Sony HDW-F900s and Panasonic Varicams on down... First Look: Sony HVR Series I typically do not describe new products by the batch, but what choice am I given when Sony simultaneously introduces three HDV camcorders and a deck, each with unprecedented attributes or capabilities? As if it were April in Las Vegas instead of November in New York...

I also discussed and screened examples of the use of inexpensive prime lenses from Sony's DSLR Alpha camera line (fruit of Sony's absorption of Konica-Minolta), namely a Sony Alpha 50mm, f /1.4, and Zeiss Sonnar 135mm, f/1.8. They adapt readily to the Z7 using a Sony LA-100W adapter ring.

If I tell you that the angle-of-view of a DSLR lens adapted to a 1/3in. sensor is multiplied by a whopping factor of seven—that is, the 135mm becomes, effectively, a 945mm extreme telephoto—you'll understand why my long shots of brawny tugs working the busy East River of Manhattan screened at DV Expo looked so cinematic (hint: compressed depth).

If I tell you that I could not have filmed (quaint term, but I'm sticking to it) the daylight-flooded interiors of architect Rick Joy's celebrated rammed-earth homes last week in Tucson, Ariz., without a wide-angle zoom, or followed him handheld down the narrow desert passages separating the weathered steel cubes of his masterpiece, Casa Jax, perhaps you'll now better understand why.

Or why switching in a matter of seconds from the wide-angle Zeiss zoom used to capture, from a mountaintop, a spectacularly colorful Western sunset, to the longer Zeiss zoom to capture in close-up the nighttime lights of downtown Tucson, sparkling below like a lattice of fine diamonds, gave the photographer in me such a feeling of command and artistry. Just like the good old 16mm days.