Quick question about wide angle lens.

[thefilmgeek]

I'm picking up the WD-H72 wide angle lens for the XH-A1 here soon. I was curious if popping it on will make the depth of field deeper just by virtue of using a wide angle lens? I've never been concerned with depth of field when using one on others peoples equipment, so have never noticed it's impact on that particular area.

I'm picking it up to make my indoor shots a little easier, but don't want to kill what little shallow depth of field I do enjoy working with.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance, guys.

 

[knightly]

It will "technically" not change the DoF at all, realistically, it'll extend the DoF. Shorter Focal Lengths make short apparent DoF.

A wide angle converter is basically an unmagnifying glass in front of the lens. It takes the current focal length of the lens and multiplies it by .7 or .9 or whatever kind of wide angle adaptor you have, basically giving you a fisheye lens.

Sam Raimi shot the evil dead with lots of 18mm lens footage to get weird warping near the edges of the screen to make it seem more unreal. In the 70's, alot of movies used super long focal lengths (250mm +) with the camera far away to compress space making it look very flat as the background was blown out of focus and the space between the subjects and the backgrounds was de-emphasized (i.e. trees that were 50 yards away from the subjects looked like they were 10 feet behind them due to the magnification of the zoom).

 

[thefilmgeek]

I'm going to be stacking two ND filters on the front of my stock camera lens on the XH-A1. Then, I was going to screw this wide angle lens onto the front of the adapters.

Is this the incorrect way to do it? Will it put some sort of undue stress on the threads due to putting the wide angle lens on top of the 2 ND filters between the stock lens? Or should I screw the wide angle lens onto the stock lens, then find some ND filters that fit the front of the wide angle lens? (if there are any)

 

[knightly]

it should be fine, but you'll probably get some "filter burn" in the corners, it's the field of view hitting the corners of the filters. the solution is to zoom in, which kind of defeats the purpose behind putting a wide angle adaptor on. You may consider just getting a stronger ND filter instead of stacking them.