The knowledge of lenses, exposure, composition, continuity, lighting, colour and language of the camera are some of the key points to know for someone to be a cinematographer. The writer will talk about the language of lenses today. Lenses play a crucial role in a film, even though the audience can never see what is being used. A film is basically projecting 3-dimensional space onto a 2-dimensional plane. But at the same time we want the depth in the scene even though its completely flat. This 3-dimensional space contains a foreground, mid ground and background. Legendary filmmaker Hitchcock also has a theory that the camera should basically be positioned so that the object has the same size as of that of the frame. The similar technique is used in shots from Lady from Shanghai. Welles used a low angle shot to show the gun as it is more important so then positioning the object can make it look prominent in the frame. The choice of lens make a huge difference and its very important. .
The wide angle lens is a lens that helps to perceive depth in a more exaggerate manner. The objects appear to be way farther apart than they are in reality. The feeling this perspective gives us is that of actually being in the scene and that is exactly the filmmaker's goal. Brown also says that as we go wider there is a lot of distortion in the objects thus the principle reason why a longer lenses are used for a portrait or a head shot is to reduce the distortion. The wide lens will have to be a lot closer than the long lens so this will cause the distortion. Deep focus is a storytelling technique that leads straight to Citizen Kane. It was often used in this film. The main principle of the deep focus is to basically where the foreground and background are in focus at the same time and we see the actions in the background very clearly. Citizen Kane has a lot of scenes where this technique is used. .
The opposite of the wide lenses is the long focal length lenses which are also known as the telephoto lenses.
