Good lenses for a Canon T3i

B

Brandon

I'm pretty new to the world of filmmaking, and I wanted to know, what lenses are like the must haves for making Indy films, and which ones are good to have and why. I'm just starting to learn about f stops and stuff, so to me a lot of it is still Chinese. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
 
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There are some great threads along the lines of "which lenses should I buy" if you browse the Cameras and Lenses section or search the whole forum.

If you let us know what you want from a lens then it will be a lot easier to help you… low-light ability, huge zoom range, really wide-angle, low price etc.
 
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Brandon said:
Good point. What I'm looking for is one that gives a wider view, and one that keeps only the one actor in focus and blurs out the rest of the image.
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Okay, that's a good start. You want a lens with a large aperture (a low f/ number) to give you shallow depth of field - this usually means a prime of some sort. You also say it should have a wider view, so wider than what? Using your current lens, what focal length (in mm) do you think would be most useful? Finally, what kind of budget do you have?
 
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Brandon said:
Good point. What I'm looking for is one that gives a wider view, and one that keeps only the one actor in focus and blurs out the rest of the image.
Click to expand...

re focus. That is due to selective depth-of-field (DOF). You can't just buy a lens to get that effect - in fact the most significant factor in most cases is the sensor size. DOF is has four factors:
  • focal length of the lens
  • aperture of the lens (f/stop)
  • focal plane (where is the camera focused.
  • the size of the sensor (or frame).
In fact that last item is not the real factor, but it's a good way of expressing it without getting into Circle of Confusion (CoC), which can be tedious.

A 28mm lens, for instance, is a pretty wide lens (in terms of field-of-view) on a 35-mm still camera, a less-wide lens on a 35mm motion picture camera (or a Canon 7D or a Red - all about the same size), but a telephoto lens on a 1/3" video camera (the HVX-200 or most consumer cameras). As the sensor size gets larger it is easier to get that DOF separation. But it's also harder to hold focus, which is a big downside for a one-man-band, especially with little experience.

Here's a web page that allows you to play with the factors: http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

What sort of camera are you using?
 
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