Differing Scope Formats

[NASA1988]

Hi Roger,

Since you’ve generally preferred spherical lenses, I wanted to ask about something I’ve thought about for a long time regarding scope photography.

Personally, I’ve always felt that if I were shooting spherical, I would be more inclined to use the taller 1.85:1 frame. If I wanted a 2.39:1 image, I would usually be drawn toward anamorphic instead, partly because I like the idea of creating the scope image optically and, historically with 35mm, making use of the taller negative area rather than extracting a wide frame from spherical photography.

I know there are many practical and technical advantages to spherical lenses themselves — greater speed, easier close focus, smaller size, fewer aberrations, more consistency across a set, and generally fewer compromises. But putting those advantages aside, I’m interested specifically in the resulting image.

I tend to prefer the spatial character of anamorphic. Beyond the obvious traits like flares, breathing, distortion, and oval bokeh, I sometimes feel that anamorphic changes the way faces, depth, foregrounds and backgrounds relate to each other in a way that can make the image feel fundamentally different, even when the final aspect ratio is exactly the same.

Do you find that spherical and anamorphic lenses render a 2.39:1 image differently in terms of space, depth, focus falloff, facial rendering, or the relationship between foreground and background, even when the more obvious anamorphic artifacts are kept under control? Or do you think those differences are often overstated?

I’m mainly interested in whether, looking only at the finished image, you feel there is an inherent difference in the way the two approaches make a scope frame feel.

 

 

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