I've been shooting tests with various anamorphic lenses lately and am finding out a lot about how they work and how to use them best with a vDSLR camera like the canon 5D mk2. Anamorphic lenses use curved elements, and sometimes prisms to stretch an image in one dimension while keeping another the same. In the case of moving pictures, they have been used to shoot widescreen/panoramic films using regular 35mm film with a common aspect ratio. I won't go into all the tech and history here, but suffice to say starting in the late 1950s and on into the present, there are many "cinemascope" ratio movies that have had a certain look that translates to our eye as "cinematic," due to many of the unusual properties anamorphic lenses create, in addition to the obvious, which is that they make a picture much wider than it is tall.
Cinemascope, the dominant trade name and format most often was presented as a ratio of 1:2.35, which is close to the shape of a US dollar bill. Composing images in this format leads to a different "language" cinematically, since a single medium close up often leaves the frame feeling too center weighted or lonely in the sense of balancing what the eye finds pleasing. It's been fun seeing images in this new way - painting on a wider canvas.
Getting that look with a vDSLR means using anamorphic adapters, or else adapting cine lenses to the vDSLR, a project that some are experimenting with nowadays. It's a new field and a group effort to figure out all the details and possibilities, and user forums such as DVXuser.com, Cinema 5D and cinematography.com are abuzz with discussions of how to master this approach.
There were many predecessors to this work, however besides of course the original cinematographers and engineers who pioneered this work in the 1950s and 60s. After the widescreen look caught on, amateur film makers adapted the technology to 16mm and Super eight film making, both of which use a somewhat square format to begin with. The non-theatrical 16mm film distribution network quickly expanded to include means to present anamorphically squeezed film prints using simple, two-element anamorphic lenses that screwed into the regular projector lenses, and these are the most common lenses on the market - people started using them with 16mm film camera taking lenses - some were designed for this double duty, in fact and marketed to amateurs as a kit solution to making widescreen home movies. The most common brands were made in Japan and marketed under many different names with slight variations on the size of the rear element for use with different brands of projector lenses but the name Sankor or Singer seems to be the home company that produced them, in model names like 16F, 16C, 16D, etc that designate rear sizes. Fitting these lenses to SLR taking lenses is problematic but the 16D models have a size that can be adapted with screw in stet-up rings. Other need a special mount of some sort to be made. These lenses are small and vignette at focal lengths wider than around 90mm.
The favored model is the Iscorama, made in Germany by Isco and sold originally for the Practika camera which uses an M42 screw in mount. It was designed with SLR lenses in mind, and sold to still camera users as a means to shoot widescreen images, mostly for slide presentation I suppose where the user would then mount his lens onto his slide projector to unsqueeze for proper presentation. On the Iscorama lenses, the anamorphic element fits onto the front of a spherical "A" lens like an adapter. The model I have, the Isco 42 has a 1.5x horizontal squeeze factor. These lenses were made decades ago and are no longer available except used and sometimes NOS in dusty camera stores.
Isco made several versions of anamorphic adapters and the most common seem to be the Isco 36, the Isco 42 and the largest, the Isco 54. These numbers seem to refer to the size of the rear element's threaded coupling, and smaller version seems to vignette at wide focal lengths in comparison to the larger models, but the 54 is slightly unwieldy, users say because of it's large size and weight. The model I bought had a built-in A lens that seemed to be a 50mm focal length and it screws in quite tight to the anamorphic, having a very recessed and small front element. It is not a sharp or fast lens, and it also has a rear element that protrudes too far back into the camera body and interferes with the SLR mirror.
I bought some 52mm cheap UV filters and removed the glass in order to make a threaded spacer that allows me to fit the Isco 42 front anamorphic unit onto a range of my manual focus Nikkor lenses, such as a pancake 50mm f1.8, my 85mm f1.8, a 105mm f 2.0, etc. Since the anamorphic's job is to stretch the horizontal field of view but to leave the vertical the same, there is a range of primes that starts with the 50mm or so ( a zoom might get you a bit wider) but has the field of view (width that is) of a lens 1.5 times wider than that in practical terms. In other words, you have a horizontal view that is more like a 35mm lens shoots, but then a height that is still like a 50mm lens. This becomes your "wide" and the 85mm and 105mm are more like the normal lenses. My cheap 200mm zoom lens makes a slight telephoto, akin to a 135mm when shooting normal stills. It's a good enough basic set of lenses to shoot a short film with, and I'm starting to use it in my everyday work but the learning curve is still shifting as I figure out all the peculiarities, of which there are many.
The Iscorama 42 was sold in various generations and sometimes is found by itself, without the dedicated M42 50mm "A" lens. The 54 was often used with a beaulieu super eight zoom lens and can be found in some camera packages that are hitting the used market as Super eight continues it's noble but sad decline.
The Sankor lenses are harder to focus, and give a less sharp image but have their good sides too, chief of which is that they are inexpensive and easy to find. If all you had was a sankor, it would be advisable to cheat and shoot wide shots by simply cropping a spherical lens in post and hoping the audience doesn't notice the difference in the overall look, but you wouldn't fool everyone. Mixing the two might be worse than simply shooting a whole film project by cropping the top and bottom of your shots.
This post is just an introduction to the subject, and I'll write more as I continue to learna nd experiment and have more images to share.
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