
Zeiss f/0.7: You Can Now Rent Two of the Largest Aperture Lenses Ever Made - joseflavio
http://petapixel.com/2013/08/05/zeiss-f0-7-you-can-now-rent-two-of-the-largest-aperture-lenses-ever-made/
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mjb
It's a real pity about the distractingly strange bokeh in the example shots.
Narrow depth of field (when desired) is a great strength of large-aperture
lenses, but if the out-of-focus part is ugly they lose a lot of value for
that.

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qq66
f/0.7 is way past the range of usefully thin depth of field, although this
look is somewhat in vogue right now as a way of distinguishing "professional"
photography from cameraphone photography.

The reason Kubrick used them was not for their depth of field, but because he
was shooting on far slower film than the digital sensors available today.
They're relatively pointless today except for their historical/curiosity
value.

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devindotcom
More specifically, he was shooting a period film with all natural lighting —
candles, to be precise, which you may recall are somewhat dimmer than
professional lighting setups! (Terence Malick, or rather his cinematographer,
does this too)

But yes, the film speed was an issue, since you can't exactly use mega-fast
film for 35mm or the grain will be distracting.

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gcb0
No light in film is natural. As no camera is like a human eye, not matter what
apperture it is using.

Proper use of lightning is part of the art. The hardest part for the movie
photography director.

What you are saying is that it was better for this movie, as a picture would
be better for a realist painter's work.

There are millions of finely executed motion pictures with great image that
gave your eyes the impression you were seeing actual candle light, without
feeling it was underwater, like Kubrick did.

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cuu508
A list of fast lenses on wikipedia:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_speed#Fast_lenses](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_speed#Fast_lenses)
There are several lenses around 0.7, and some with even lower f-numbers.

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nknighthb
They don't appear to be commercially available, and some of them seem rather
special-purpose.

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jychang
Most are for XRay imaging.

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ams6110
They don't necessarily do a terrible job at optical imaging though.
[http://forum.mflenses.com/viewtopic.php?t=50166](http://forum.mflenses.com/viewtopic.php?t=50166)

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sbierwagen
Note that the Zeiss f/0.7 casts a pretty small image circle: the camera it's
paired with uses a 21.1 x 11.9mm sensor. (75% as big as a Canon APS-C sensor)

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devindotcom
Yes, off the top of my head it seems that an F/1.2 lens made for full frame
cameras these days would actually offer superior light gathering ability,
though the quality of the final image compared with Kubrick's film stills
would be doubtless a matter for discussion.

That said, of course, these lenses are marvels and any photographer would be
delighted to give them a try — we do value novelty and and uniqueness in this
sort of thing.

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bbayer
As a complete noob about this matter, what is the challenge of building this
kind of lens and what makes it special?

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jd007
Simply put, a bigger aperture means you can let more light in, which means
better image quality in low light conditions (don't need to increase
film/sensor ISO level as much), and shorter minimum exposure time (for taking
photos of super fast actions without blurring). It also gives you a much
shallower depth of field which cannot be achieved with something of a smaller
aperture.

It is of course more expensive to build a lens like this, because the larger
the aperture, the larger your lens cross section has to be (to actually let
the light in), and the harder it is to design such a big lens that minimizes
optical aberrations. With glass, the maximum aperture size theoretically
achievable is around f/0.5, anything bigger and you will have to use something
with a higher index of refraction than glass. So f/0.7 is very impressive.

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ars
> that minimizes optical aberrations

There is an interesting idea to simply let the lens have its aberrations and
correct for them in software. i.e. customize the sensor to match the exact
aberrations of the lens so the end result is normal.

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pervycreeper
Bit of a waste to couple those lenses with anything but the most exceptional
of sensors

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sirkneeland
Cool, so it'll be on the Nokia 1030, right?

