#iscowidescreen2000

[michaeljrea]

BLOG POST: Madrid: Experiments in cinemascope

I took the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera to Madrid for a couple of days on a short December holiday with my Dad (he makes a couple of Hitchcock Cameos!) Shooting anamorphic with a 1.5x ISCO Widescreen 2000 MC I wanted to see how wide I could get – probably the biggest limitation of scope shooting, especially on the BMPCC with its 2.88 crop.

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KINDA…ER…WES ANDERSON! So how does it do? The good news is the lens is sharp from wide open, corner to corner but there is some distortion – you’ll particularly see it in any shots with buildings and horizontals which are quite close – its battle of the bulge time! In fact, the look is not dissimilar to the vashimorphic40 filter effect (vashivisuals.com/vashimorphic40-free-anamorphic-effects-project/) which aims to replicate the field curvature of a 40mm Panavision Primo Anamorphic – think Wes Anderson! So I guess that’s not always a bad thing, depends what you are looking for. I guess for every optical flaw, there’s always an artistic defence!

DEPTH OF FIELD AND BOKEH The main downside with this combo is that its quite difficult to get any depth of field without diopters and moving in very close. The ISCO, while being a focus through anamorphic (and incredibly sharp), its minimum focus distance is around 4M, so with a 35mm Horizontal FOV, even wide open you are not going to get much bokeh, especially on the BMPCC / Speedbooster. As a side note, There are a couple of shots with a Helios 44-M7 in this (el Rastro Fleamarket footage) but everything else is with the Pentacon 30mm F3.5. There are a few shots with a 0.5 and 1.6 Diopter on the Pentacon, so background blur is possible, but for this trip I tried to keep the ‘fannying about’ with lenses and diopters to a minimum since i wasn’t on my own 😉

FLARES Really struggled with alignment on a few shots, very hard to get the ISCO to give any horizontal flares even pointing into the sun. This is possibly because its the MC version (Multi Coated) which will be more flare resistant.CONCLUSION For £30 i paid for the lens, I’m fairly delighted with it, especially in terms of edge to edge sharpness. You just need to be careful with the distortion on closer shots in particular if that’s not what you are looking for. But using it alongside a few other lenses, it will certainly be handy to have it there as an option.