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wide DOF for miniature photography needed!


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hey guys. i have a project upcoming with some miniatures involved. for a lot of stuff i might be using the 14mm ultra prime since this one seems to have the best characteristics all the ultra primes for the job. dofmaster.com's calculater tells me that even fully stopped down it still has a near limit of 11.3 cm and this might not be close enough for the shots to work. so what are my options here? can i use a diopter? how would a diopter basically affect the DOF at the far end? so if anyone can share some experiences or has any useful info, even if that involves unusual ways of doing things, i'd be very glad to hear it! thanks!

Edited by Alex Aust
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hey guys. i have a project upcoming with some miniatures involved. for a lot of stuff i might be using the 14mm ultra prime since this one seems to have the best characteristics all the ultra primes for the job. dofmaster.comcom's calculater tells me that even fully stopped down it still has a near limit of 11.3 cm and this might not be close enough for the shots to work. so what are my options here? can i use a diopter? how would a diopter basically affect the DOF at the far end? so if anyone can share some experiences or has any useful info, even if that involves unusual ways of doing things, i'd be very glad to hear it! thanks!

 

Hi,

 

The DOF will be less as you magnify the image using a dioptre. Whats actually in focus will be the same whatever focal length lens you use if the image size remains the same. Multi exposures with different focus is often done with miniatures.

 

Your going to find lighting quite a challenge with a 14mm lens, I suspect you would find a longer lens easier, I usually end up with a 35, 50, 85, 100, 135 for miniatures although I have used an 18 once in my life!, a 24 & 28 occasionally. It's all down to how long you have for each shot!

 

You might want to try using extension tubes instead of dioptres. You could also mount the lens back to front with gaffer tape & a toilet roll if you want to get very close.

 

Stephen

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thanks. i need a wide lens to get the perspectives right. and we can't simply upsize the scale to whatever we'd like, we're forced to use a specific scale that happens to be quite small... VERY roughly 1:500 or something like that. there is also a (rather old, i believe) line of cine macro lenses from arri that is available at rentals here. a nice one would be the 16mm which focuses to ~16 cm. do you (or anybody else) know what the smallest aperture is on that lens line?

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thanks. i need a wide lens to get the perspectives right. and we can't simply upsize the scale to whatever we'd like, we're forced to use a specific scale that happens to be quite small... VERY roughly 1:500 or something like that. there is also a (rather old, i believe) line of cine macro lenses from arri that is available at rentals here. a nice one would be the 16mm which focuses to ~16 cm. do you (or anybody else) know what the smallest aperture is on that lens line?

 

T32

With scale of 1:500 you will only get 'birds eye view' the camera will be 500 times higher than it is in reality!

Is there any object movement? if so ho fast can your camera go?

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T32? sounds not too bad! we're shooting on a RED, so 1-120 fpsis possible

 

Hi,

 

If any of your models are moving you would need to shoot at 536 fps if you want the movement to look full size & match movement of full size @24 fps, otherwise the models will look very fake.

 

Bear in mind at T32 the lens is well past it's sharpest, using a windowed sensor of a RED at T32 will not look good. You wanted a wide angle lens, it will be almost a 'standard' lens with that format.

 

Stephen

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thanks. we don't have movement so we can in fact undercrank to get the exposure. i haven't shot the arri macros before, if t32 is not sharp enough i might stop it down less/undercrank more until DOF becomes the bottleneck. we also shoot at 4k.

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thanks. we don't have movement so we can in fact undercrank to get the exposure. i haven't shot the arri macros before, if t32 is not sharp enough i might stop it down less/undercrank more until DOF becomes the bottleneck. we also shoot at 4k.

 

At 4k you may find T32 acceptable, it depends on what your final output will be, resoloution starts dropping off past T11.

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