The fusion of vintage lenses and modern tech in cinematography reflects a dynamic balance between history and innovation, where classic glass thrives alongside digital advancements.
The fascination of modern cinematography with not-so-modern lenses hints at a sort of tension between an established artform and the innovation it has always attracted. No matter how dedicated the field is to its history, though, that same progress has made old lenses much more usable and creating the most appropriate fusion of traditional and contemporary engineering has become a defining characteristic of post-photochemical cinematography.
Andrew Wonder’s involvement in film and TV began at almost exactly the time that technological segue began to happen. “I was in the last class at NYU to be taught film all the way through, but I had also worked for MTV when I was at high school, so I was using digital before most people. When I was at school, there was this whole conflict between the old tools and the new tools. Like AI today, it was all going to go digital or it was all film. The RED camera came out as I graduated. The digital sensors started coming out, and everything looked the same.”
In that era, Wonder had the chance to collaborate with Harris Savides and help him with some film testing. “We’d go through his bins in his office, we’d find lens cells and filters, and pieces… that’s when I started collecting things.” Since then, film itself has shown a remarkable resistance to being usurped, but Wonder’s interest was still piqued sufficiently to dive into a world of specifications, design lineages, and technological subtleties.
“I’ve been a collector of weird glass for decades. I remember my first Leica lens, a 35mm Summicron from [lens designer] Walter Mandler. I always thought a Leica was something you earned. I bought it in 2012 on eBay. There was a spherical version and a pre-spherical version.”
The pride of Wonder’s collection, though, is “a very special set of Zeiss lenses I use on everything – I’m a Zeiss B Speed fan. They were created for Kubrick on Barry Lyndon. Taxi Driver was shot on them, and so many films of that late-’70s, early-’80s era. Over about 10 years I purchased about four sets of them, and working with Duclos in California I boiled them down to a set I liked. We call them the Wonder Speeds!”
Production technology is sometimes criticised for changing so fast that practitioners struggle to build long-term familiarity with their tools, and in that context Wonder’s affinity for his now-rehoused B Speeds seems well-motivated. “They’ve been with me my whole life. I know the close focus, I know the different stops, I don’t even have to look at the barrels anymore to focus. That’s the gift. And they’re compact: even my rehoused ones are very small. Could something give me different bokeh or falloff? Sure. But they can’t make lead elements anymore, so they can’t make anything as small.”
Perhaps uniquely, Wonder’s familiarity with the lenses must change as they do. “I see them as they age. I did three features with them last year and they looked different on the last one from the first one. In two of them there’s a plastic element and on every one it starts to bubble… the contrast is changing on the 18mm and 25mm every day. My 35mm and my 50mm look different. One’s a little warmer, one’s a little cooler. I kept the original irises, I liked the triangles! I find myself using them less and less for the focal length, but more for the vibe. That’s the magic of vintage… it’s not just getting an old set.”
Fast modern cameras make many of Wonder’s favourite quirks easier to control, though modern sensors can highlight the difference between a lens which can reasonably be said to cover a sensor in a sharply-resolved image, and a lens which merely manages to project light from edge to edge. “The Master Primes never look good on Super 35mm to me,” Wonder says, by way of example. “They were so sharp. Then the Alexa and Mini came out, and the sensor is a little bigger. Zeiss overengineer the image circle on all of them, but I remember doing my first car spots with a Mini, and because of that extra area of the sensor I was getting all these weird swirly corners even on the Master Primes.”
Modern sensors, then, might make quirky lenses look quirkier, but Wonder has encountered few limitations even in the famously fastidious world of commercials. “Car commercials are interesting. Some clients are Master Prime clients, and some are old glass clients. Sometimes I’ll put a modern lens on the arm car, and put my vintage Zeiss handheld inside. It’s amazing. There’s so many films where I shoot Super 35 mode and Super 16 mode on the same camera.”
Similarly, current post production techniques have allowed cinematographers to overlook characteristics which might once have been dealbreakers. “Two things that happened at once. The glass is getting older and harder to match, but at the same time the colour correction is different. When I’m wide open they have terrible chromatic aberration. I used to rent Master Primes on bigger car jobs, but now in Resolve I can zap the magenta corners and not see the aberrations.”
The need to differentiate pictures which are characterful from pictures which are merely fuzzy is, Wonder says, an issue which has provoked him – reluctantly – to abandon old ideas. “I had set two of the Baltars that Alex [“Zero Optik”] Nelson made, and I sold them for that reason. They were 2.5s, but they looked best a stop and half down. In a room where it was dark, I couldn’t get any vibe off them. People say with [fast cameras] it makes less of a difference – look at the Bob Dylan movie, they shot at twelve thousand ISO and they shot that movie at an 8.”
WHAT’S IT WORTH?
Despite Wonder’s clear enthusiasm for his prized set of vintage lenses and for classic glass in general, his approach is tempered by the perennial truism that filmmaking is not about the toys. “Intention is everything,” he states, “and I don’t think a vintage lens is an intention. There is no one-size-fits-all, but when there’s more movies on Netflix than any of us will watch in our lives, we have to ask what intention we’re bringing to cinema and what fingerprint we’ll leave behind.”
“I’m a Zeiss guy. But I remember that first Leica lens and the way it bloomed wide open, and how much a lens becomes your fingerprint. Would I do vintage now, if I were starting again, when I can go and buy a $200 Chinese lens that looks pretty good?”
There is, Wonder suggests, a sort of watershed between irrelevant obsolescence and coveted antiquity. “The things you like today you probably won’t like in 10 years and the things you sell today will be the things you want again in 10 years. I’m glad I got my B Speeds. I have sold stuff that is worth four times as much now. It’s an interesting question we must ask ourselves. A vintage set of K35s that was once worth 35K is now worth 250K. Will they one day be worth 500K?”
Wonder hints that the advance of machine learning and completely orthogonal technologies such as light field arrays might be disruptive but otherwise hazards the prediction that “we’ve hit peak glass. The market is so oversaturated… what we now know as vintage glass might be replaced by something else. I think we should enjoy them, before the robots or the light field take it all away!”
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Words: Phil Rhodes
