1 The Director of Photography – an overview

Lenses and perspective 171
The houses are 90 per cent of the original distance, the car, say, 40 per
cent and the woman now, say, 5 per cent of the scene depth in Figure 19.7.
What has happened? By comparison with the earlier close-up,
things are very different. Again, we have a proportional change and
again both the car and the houses are still in the story, so we are still
discussing these elements of the scene with the audience.
One unfortunate thing has occurred, though. Carefully compare the
close-ups in Figures 19.6 and 19.9. You will notice that the woman’s
face has become wider and a little distorted. This is a very common
effect when taking a close-up on a wide-angle lens and should be
guarded against. It must be handled very carefully and, if possible, should
not be allowed to happen to the extent that a lay audience will ever
notice it. Your actors and your producer, who has in all probability paid
them large sums, will not thank you if you photograph them in this way.
But how has this distortion come about? It is simple – we have
brought the camera so near that the proportional differences we discussed
earlier now affect the contours of the face. At this distance, the
camera is so close that the tip of the woman’s nose is probably some
70 per cent of the distance to her ear lobes, so the proportional difference
in size that affected the car and the houses is now sufficiently
great as to affect the shape of her face.
Any lens wider than that considered normal for the format you are
using should be avoided for a close-up. In fact, if at all possible, no
close-up should ever be made on a lens less than twice the focal length
of a normal lens.
So we see that we can never choose a lens for just its angle of view –
the perspective that goes with that choice must always be considered.
Focal length and emotional involvement
Camera placement
It is important to remember that where you place your camera or,
more exactly, where you place the nodal point of your taking lens is
where you place your audience.
Think of it this way: the human eye is roughly spherical and when
looking left or right, up or down, is rotating about the centre of that
sphere as the eyeball swivels in the eye socket.With a camera lens, the
optical centre of the lens, its nodal point, is the point where if you
swivel the lens and camera about this point the image will appear to
neither track left or right nor move up or down. Gears, and a few fluid
heads, are constructed so that the pan and tilt movements can both
rotate about the nodal point of the lens. When this is done the camera
movements will be as close to the way a human eye rotates in its
socket and therefore feel the most natural.
Extending this argument, it becomes clear that if we wish to either
involve the audience in the action, or make it feel they are at a distance,
where we figuratively place the centre of their eye will make
them feel they are at that distance from the subject.
So choosing the camera position is very important, for it is also
choosing the emotional position of the audience; this position will
become the place they would physically expect to be observing from
were they present, in real life, at the action to be photographed.