Nostr Film Club on Nostr: The lenses were left over from a batch made for use for NASA’s Apollo moon-landing ...
The lenses were left over from a batch made for use for NASA’s Apollo moon-landing program.
The following is taken from an interview with John Alcott which I posted earlier. It’s a fascinating read if you’re interested in the technical side. 📽
INTERVIEWER: Now we come to the scenes which have caused more comment than anything else in this overall beautiful film — namely the candlelight scenes. Can you tell me about these and how they were executed?
JOHN ALCOTT : The objective was to shoot these scenes exclusively by candlelight — that is, without a boost from any artificial light whatsoever. As I mentioned earlier, Stanley Kubrick and I had been discussing this possibility for years, but had not been able to find sufficiently fast lenses to do it. Stanley finally discovered three 50mm t/0.7 Zeiss still-camera lenses which were left over from a batch made for use by NASA in their Apollo moon-landing program. We had a non-reflexed Mitchell BNC which was sent over to Ed DiGiulio to be reconstructed to accept this ultra-fast lens. He had to mill out the existing lens mounts, because the rear element of this t/0.7 lens was virtually something like 4mm from the film plane. It took quite a while, and when we got the camera back we made quite extensive tests on it.
The following is taken from an interview with John Alcott which I posted earlier. It’s a fascinating read if you’re interested in the technical side. 📽
INTERVIEWER: Now we come to the scenes which have caused more comment than anything else in this overall beautiful film — namely the candlelight scenes. Can you tell me about these and how they were executed?
JOHN ALCOTT : The objective was to shoot these scenes exclusively by candlelight — that is, without a boost from any artificial light whatsoever. As I mentioned earlier, Stanley Kubrick and I had been discussing this possibility for years, but had not been able to find sufficiently fast lenses to do it. Stanley finally discovered three 50mm t/0.7 Zeiss still-camera lenses which were left over from a batch made for use by NASA in their Apollo moon-landing program. We had a non-reflexed Mitchell BNC which was sent over to Ed DiGiulio to be reconstructed to accept this ultra-fast lens. He had to mill out the existing lens mounts, because the rear element of this t/0.7 lens was virtually something like 4mm from the film plane. It took quite a while, and when we got the camera back we made quite extensive tests on it.