Camera Lens for Shadow Puppet animation?

Hello!

I'm looking for some advice on Camera Lenses.

I am just starting a project to make a short animated shadow puppet film and I'm trying to work out the best Lens type to use when down shooting with my Canon EOS 550 camera. I have a strong light source below the table and three glass shelves with the lower two for tracing paper backgrounds and the highest one for black silhouette puppets. I want to be able to have sharp focus on the black silhouettes and to play with the focus on the background layers. I have been advised that an older glass lens is the way to go but I'm not sure which focal length is the right one. Currently thinking perhaps a 28mm canon lens but any advice would be hugely appreciated!

Thankyou!

The two things to consider are field of view and depth of field.

You can draw a simple diagram of a triangle to work out the best field of view.

The base BC is the width of your stage, and the top point A is your camera lens. The height of the lens above the stage is the height of the triangle. The angle at A is the angle of view of the lens.

As you can raise and lower the camera on the copy stand, the angle of view has some leeway.

Here is a table giving fields of view for various lenses and sensor sizes. Your camera has an APS-C sensor, which is what Nikon users call DX.

https://www.nikonians.org/reviews/fov-tables

As for depth of field, you want a lens that opens fairly wide but doesn't cost a fortune. An f/1.8 lens will probably do, and an f/1.4 lens would be ideal. Note that the cheapest lenses on the market don't have auto focus, and manual focussing a camera that is on a copy stand is awkward.

Don Cox

Bobby Thunder wrote:

I am just starting a project to make a short animated shadow puppet film and I'm trying to work out the best Lens type to use when down shooting with my Canon EOS 550 camera. I have a strong light source below the table and three glass shelves with the lower two for tracing paper backgrounds and the highest one for black silhouette puppets. I want to be able to have sharp focus on the black silhouettes and to play with the focus on the background layers. I have been advised that an older glass lens is the way to go but I'm not sure which focal length is the right one. Currently thinking perhaps a 28mm canon lens but any advice would be hugely appreciated!

I'd go with a cheap "fast 50" -- something like an old M42 SMC Takumar 50mm f/1.4 or 55mm f/1.8.

Manual focus allows you better control over focus -- and a good old lens like the above will stay at the distance it is focused on for multiple shots. The 50mm preference is simply because that roughly where the fastest lenses are cheapest, and you want fast to be able to get shallow depth of field. Simply adjust the height of your rig for 50mm to get the right crop of the scene; if 50mm makes that too large a distance, a shorter focal length will work, but they'll give les control over depth of field (even at the same f/1.4 aperture, not to mention 28mm f/1.4 lenses are expensive and very rare). The old Takumars also deal pretty well with strong backlighting, which not all fast lenses do.