New Toy: Split Diopter
2023-10-24
I have purchased a new toy, a split diopter lens to attach to my main lens. It's half of a macro lens that you attach to the front so that one half of your photo can be focusing on something directly in front of it while the other half is looking much further away. Why would you want to do that? You can take photos that seem impossible. I associate them more with movies than photography (and most strongly with Brian de Palma), and once you know to look for them, you'll realize there are a bunch of iconic shots in big films that use them. All of this comes at a bit of a cost though. There's some blurring at the edge of the lens which you need to work out how to hide/embrace. The other cost is that they seem hard to learn how to use. I didn't really understand how close the lens half needed to focus so I was just getting blur from it at first and even with a rough understanding of that it's fairly hard to set up a shot without a tripod. After a lackluster-to-bad set of shots I took while on a run, I sat down and worked out the basics of using it. I would say I still don't really have it down but I'm happy I'm making progress
The same shot without the split diopter
The same shot but with the lens orthoginal to the change in depth