As much as the camera itself, lenses are what determines the things you can achieve technically. And they don’t have to be expensive. One of my favourite lenses, as far as the look is concerned, cost me about 30$ on ebay.
A lense that is mediocre for photography can be an excellent film lense
Why is that? Two reasons:
- The resolution of video is ridiculous compared to photos. So inaccuracies that you see staring at a 12 Megapixel still image won’t even be visible in full HD or 720p
- Film is 24/25/30 pictures per second. So you don’t have the time to look at inaccuracies in a single frame and your audience will not notice that. Stuff like inaccuracies around the edges will be there in a lab experiment but people (at least 99 out of 100) watching your movie, following your story, will not see them.
I bought several old lenses for the analog Canon FD cameras and use them with an adapter on my GH1/GH2 cameras and those are a real bargain and produce beautiful pictures.
Buy lenses with a fixed focal length
For making movies, the convenience a zoom lense gives you, is not as important as in a documentary situation, where you may have to adapt quickly to a new situation. On the other hand lenses with a large maximum aperture value, i.e. lenses which need less light to produce a good picture (also called “fast” lenses), are muuuuch cheaper with a fixed focal length than as a zoom version. And this will often make the difference between being able to use a certain location or not.
Example: The zoom lense (14mm – 140mm) that came with my Panasonic GH1 has a maximum aperture of 4.0 and costs about 700$. The “fastest” lense I got on ebay (for about 30$) is an old Canon 50mm with a maximum aperture of 1.4, which means, it has eight times more light than my zoom, which means it can be used in rather dark rooms without additional light where the zoom lense is simply not usable even at rather high ISO values.
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