Trying to find out about SLR lenses on Canon xl1s

[Todd Terry]

I didn’t get a chance to look at the links yet… but I’m assuming that the elusive very shallow depth of field is what you are after…

[Sean Winn] “I’m under the impression that attaching SLR type lenses to my camera will provide that kind of depth of field.”

Well…. yes, and no. Attaching 35mm lenses to your camera will provide shallow depths of field. But unfortunately attaching those lenses directly to your camera will not.

The long and short of it is that you need a depth-of-field lens converter, a gadget which goes between the lens and your camera body and restores the 35mm DoF characteristics. They range from pretty simple to quite complicated, and from pretty cheap (less than a grand) to pretty expensive (more than $10,000). It does indeed work very very well, I use a P+S Technik Mini35 converter with my Canon XLH1 almost every day.

I could go into this in great detail, but it has been covered in various COW forums bunches of times. I’d suggest doing a forum search for “depth of field” and you will find several threads with lots of info. You can also dig through the COW Magazine archives (I think the PDFs are here on the COW somewhere), in last Summer’s issue I wrote an article about DoF conversion using 35mm cine lenses and our Canon camera which might give you some details.

Give those a read, and if you have any more questions give a shout, will be happy to help…..

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Sean Winn]

Todd,
Great info, really appreciate it…
S