Ever used a split diopter or, as they are sometimes called, half diopter? It's essentially half a close-up diopter that you screw onto the end of your lens; they cut the glass in half and leave the area in the filter ring empty. That way you can have a very close foreground in focus and a distant background also in focus without stopping down to a diffraction-inducing tiny aperture (or you can just get a greater effective DOF than even the smallest aperture would achieve). Generally the dividing line is out of focus enough to be invisible but you have to be careful how you position it in the composition.
I was just reading about an amazing use of a split diopter in a motion picture application. In the classic Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman film All the President's Men there's a scene where Robert Redford is talking on the phone in the news room where the director and cinematographer use the split diopter in an incredibly subtle yet effective way, and one that fits thematically with what's going on in the scene. Here's where I read about it: http://www.avclub.com/article/focus-key-most-subtly-powerful-moment-all-presiden-206873 Notice in the embedded video clip how on the right side of the screen the foreground's in focus but the background is out of focus. Yet on the left side of the screen the background is in focus and the foreground (like the typewriter) is out of focus. I've seen this movie several times and never noticed this. OK. Film geek moment over. You can go about your business now. If you've even read this far ;-) -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
