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Is Barry Lyndon F0.7 lens a hoax?


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If the lens is 0.7 shot wide open, how can it possibly have this much of depth of field? I've used f1.0 lens shot at wide open, but the scene looks like it's shot way wider than even f1.0. 
Am I wrong?
Look up on the internet, even the regular canon f1.2 lens gives shallower depth of field that wha I see in this scene. 
Did they not shoot it at f.0.7 then?
 

 

Edited by Wendy Sanders McDonlad
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18 hours ago, Wendy Sanders McDonlad said:

I guess the sharpness of the lens explain that a little... hmm... still not so convinced... 2 full stops more than 1.4... I'm expecting a lot less DOF...well none of us used the lens I guess at this moment there's no point arguing but to take their word for it. 

 

https://ascmag.com/articles/flashback-barry-lyndon

Here is an incredibly interesting interview with Cinematographer John Alcott on the photography of Barry Lyndon and I personally read the entire thing. However, in the event you don't feel like reading it because it is very long, here is an excerpt consisting of only things related to the entire candle light sequence in the interview. Very interesting stuff.

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Now we come to the scenes which have caused more comment than anything else in this overall beautiful film — namely the candlelight scenes. Can you tell me about these and how they were executed?

 

The objective was to shoot these scenes exclusively by candlelight — that is, without a boost from any artificial light whatsoever. As I mentioned earlier, Stanley Kubrick and I had been discussing this possibility for years, but had not been able to find sufficiently fast lenses to do it. Stanley finally discovered three 50mm t/0.7 Zeiss still-camera lenses which were left over from a batch made for use by NASA in their Apollo moon-landing program. We had a non-reflexed Mitchell BNC which was sent over to Ed DiGiulio to be reconstructed to accept this ultra-fast lens. He had to mill out the existing lens mounts, because the rear element of this t/0.7 lens was virtually something like 4mm from the film plane. It took quite a while, and when we got the camera back we made quite extensive tests on it.

The Zeiss lens was like no other lens in a way, because when you look through any normal type of lens, like the Panavision T/1.1 or the Angenieux f/0.95, you are looking through the optical system and by just altering the focus you can tell whether it’s in or out of focus. But when you looked through this lens it appeared to have fantastic range of focus, quite unbelievable. However, when you did a photographic test you discovered that it had no depth at all — which one expected anyway. So we literally had to scale this lens by doing hand tests from about 200 feet down to about 4 feet, marking every distance that would lead up to the 10-foot range. We had to literally get it down to inches on the actual scaling.

 

You say that the focal length was 50mm?

 

It was 50mm, but then we acquired a projection lens of the reduction type, which Ed DiGiulio fitted over another 50mm lens to give us a 36.5mm lens for a wider-angle coverage. The original 50mm lens was used for virtually all the medium shots and close shots.

 

And those scenes were illuminated entirely by candlelight?

 

Entirely by the candles. In the sequence were Lord Ludd and Barry are in the gaming room and he loses a large amount of money, the set was lit entirely by the candles, but I had metal reflectors made to mount above the two chandeliers, the main purpose being to keep the heat of the candles from damaging the ceiling. However, it also acted as a light reflector to provide an overall illumination of toplight.

 

How many foot-candles — no pun intended — would you say you were using in that case?

 

Roughly, three foot-candles was the key. We were forcing the whole picture one stop in development. Incidentally, I found a great advantage in using the Gossen Panalux electronic meter for those sequences because it goes down to half foot-candle measurements. It’s a very good meter for those extreme low-light situations. We were using 70-candle chandeliers, and most of the time I could also use either five-candle or three-candle table candelabra as well. We actually went for a burnt-out effect, a very high key on the faces themselves.

 

What were some of the other problems attendant to using this ultra-fast lens to shoot entire by candlelight?

 

There was, first of all, the problem of finding a side viewfinder that would transmit enough light to show us where we were framed. The conventional viewfinder would not do at all, because it involves prisms which cause such a high degree of light loss that very little image is visible at such low light levels. Instead, we had to adapt to the BNC a viewfinder from one of the old Technicolor three-strip cameras. It works on a principle of mirrors and simply reflects what is “sees,” resulting in a much brighter image. There is very little parallax with that viewfinder, since it mounts so close to the lens.

 

What about the depth of field problem?

As I suggested before, that was indeed a problem. The point of focus was so critical and there was hardly any depth of field with that f/0.7 lens. My focus operator, Doug Milsome [ASC], used a closed-circuit video camera as the only way to keep track of the distances with any degree of accuracy. The video camera was placed at a 90-degree angle to the film camera position and was monitored by means of a TV screen mounted above the camera lens scale. A grid was placed over the TV screen and by taping the various artists’ positions, the distances could be transferred to the TV grid to allow the artists a certain flexibility of movement, while keeping them in focus. It was a tricky operation, but according to all reports, it worked out quite satisfactorily.

 

Here's an excerpt from a separate article on how the idea of the candle light sequence came about, their first encounter with the lens, and the struggles involved in figuring out how to mount it to the BNC camera.

Quote

 

At the very early stages of his preparation for Barry Lyndon, Kubrick scoured the world looking for exotic, ultra-fast lenses, because he knew he would be shooting extremely low light level scenes. It was his objective, incredible as it seemed at the time, to photograph candle-lit scenes in old English castles by only the light of the candles themselves! A former still photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick has become extremely knowledgeable with regard to lenses and, in fact, has taught himself every phase of the technical application of his filming equipment. He called one day to ask me if I thought I could fit a Zeiss lens he had procured, which had a focal length of 50mm and a maximum aperture of f/O.7. He sent me the dimensional specifications, and I reported that it was impossible to fit the lens to his BNC because of its large diameter and also because the rear element came within 4mm of the film plane. Stanley, being the meticulous craftsman that he is, would not take “No” for an answer and persisted until I reluctantly agreed to take a hard look at the problem.

 

When the lens arrived, we could see it was designed as a still camera lens, with a Compur shutter built into the lens. The diameter of the lens was so large that it would just barely fit into the BNC lens port, leaving no room for an additional focusing shell. As a consequence, we had to design a focusing arrangement so that the entire lens barrel rotates freely in the lens port. To avoid possible binds that might result from this unconventional mode of operation, we added a second locating pin to the standard BNC lens flange, so that the two pins securely held the lens barrel concentric with the lens port during operation.

The problem of the close proximity of the rear element to the film plane was a much more difficult matter to resolve. To begin with, we removed the adjustable shutter blade, leaving the camera with only a fixed maximum opening. We then had to machine the body housing and the aperture plate a considerable distance inward so that the fixed shutter blade could be pulled back as far as possible toward the film plane.

 

Naturally, the Compur shutter had to be dismantled and the iris leaves altered so that they could be manually operated in the normal manner. Calibrating the focus scale on the lens presented quite a problem, too. A lens as fast as this has an extremely shallow depth of field when shooting wide open, so Kubrick understandably wanted to have as broad a band spread on the scale as possible. To do this we used an extremely fine thread for the focusing barrel and this resulted in a scale which required two complete revolutions to go from infinity down to approximately 5’. We had to stop at 5’ or it would have taken several more revolutions to bring it to the near focus point. Kubrick agreed that this was as close a focus as he would require, and that stopping at two revolutions would make the scale less ambiguous.

 

Remembering that this lens was to be used on a non-reflexed BNC and, further, that the rear element of the lens came within 4mm of the film plane, an additional problem was that the camera could not be racked over to the viewing position if the lens were in its normal filming position. Accordingly, we designed a safety interlock switch so that the lens had to be rotated a full nine revolutions out before the micro switch would trip, permitting the camera to be racked over. In this manner, we protected the rear element of the lens from being inadvertently smashed if the operator attempted to rack over before the lens was moved forward sufficiently.

 

The lens and camera were sent to Kubrick, who film-tested it and reported that the results were fantastic. He found, however, that he did have to recalibrate our scale, apparently because of some slight shift in camera position during shipment. We subsequently determined that it was necessary for us to tighten up the dovetail gibs upon which the camera racks back and forth to the point where racking over became fairly stiff, since the flange focal depth of the lens was so extremely critical.

At this point, Kubrick complained that the single 50mm focal length was too limiting and that what he required was a wider-angle lens of the same speed. He began thinking in terms of various anamorphosing schemes or other optical tricks to widen the angle of the lens we had. I told him that before doing anything as mind-boggling as this I would check with some of the optical experts I knew to see if there were a simpler way. As luck would have it, Dr. Richard Vetter of Todd-A-O, a man whose optical expertise I’ve always held in high esteem, suggested to me that the result I was trying to achieve could probably be accomplished by using a projection lens adapter, designed by the Kollmorgen Corporation, which was originally intended to modify the focal length of 70mm projection lenses in theatres so that the image format could exactly match the size of the screen.

 

We purchased one of these adapters, mounted it to the front of the lens, and after some optical and mechanical manipulation we were pleased to see that the effective focal length of our composite lens system was 36.5mm. The aperture of the new 36.5mm lens remained at f/0.7 and its effective aperture was reduced only slightly by the minor light absorption in the two front elements. We sent this lens on to Kubrick and, again, he was ecstatic with the results. However, being the demanding technical genius that he is, Stanley urged us to go further and see if we could come up with a still wider angle lens. Again I turned to Dr. Vetter, and this time he provided me with a Dimension 150 lens adapter which, when mounted to the front of still another Zeiss 50mm prime lens, gave us an effective focal length of 24mm. However, at this point, our improvisational engineering techniques began to catch up with us and Kubrick determined that the lens gave a bit too much distortion, so that he would not wish to intercut photography from this lens with photography from the other two.

 

 

Edited by Matthew J. Walker
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On 8/19/2020 at 3:55 PM, Wendy Sanders McDonlad said:
 
If the lens is 0.7 shot wide open, how can it possibly have this much of depth of field? I've used f1.0 lens shot at wide open, but the scene looks like it's shot way wider than even f1.0. 
Am I wrong?
Look up on the internet, even the regular canon f1.2 lens gives shallower depth of field that wha I see in this scene. 
Did they not shoot it at f.0.7 then?
 

 

There’s not much in sharp focus at all in most of the famous candlelit ‘Barry Lyndon’ scenes. Everything is right on the edge of being complete mush (in a beautiful way). They are technically in focus, as per Douglas Milsome, who was the focus puller on that film. But the lens doesn’t resolve well at f/0.7 and there is so little depth of field that the actors are always right on the edge of it.

If you’re used to shooting on something like a Leica Noctilux 50mm f/0.95, it may be that part of the reason you perceive a shallower depth of field is that the lens may be focused quite close for portraits. The Zeiss f/0.7 lens doesn’t actually focus that close. Here’s a few photos of the actual lens from the Kubrick Exhibit, you can see the minimum focus is 6’: 

989B49DA-BAF7-4F82-A4C7-BA84D3EA01DA.thumb.jpeg.23c821a53b16a350d46c903a9eb2083a.jpeg

203B678F-70E8-44E4-B6C4-2632EA25FF5C.thumb.jpeg.461f2948c3e6bbc324ea52e83fd0b12f.jpeg

4D87C0E4-2E4B-47BB-ADD3-BCE43EAE82D4.thumb.jpeg.bb3b853f4580ecbc89cf38ce13053753.jpeg

ED59926A-9E77-48C9-98D9-370687317D72.thumb.jpeg.4a820bc1be3bd70384d9c364d53bfb6e.jpeg

BCB8C8D4-3F1E-4A3A-A0BD-73642FFC238A.thumb.jpeg.d96d71211c47367811aa0c7197b24720.jpeg

Here, Mr. Milsome discusses the technical challenges he had on the film and how he kept it in focus:

 

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