I have posted here some different shots of the same hat to prove a point, being that the taper factor in some ROTLA shots are sometimes not the hat but the camera lens. Here is a hat as seen through a 28mm wide-angle lens, which might be used in a scene where there isn’t a lot of room (for the camera that is, not the hat).
This lens is also used for sweeping landscapes and here’s why:
A wide-angle lens creates depth or distance between the foreground and the background.
It makes things close to the lens look big (such as a hat brim), and things in the distance look smaller (such as a hat’s crown) and even further away.
Here is a shot of the same hat from the same camera height, but using a 45mm lens. This is not considered wide angle but it still causes a tapered look.
Now look at the same hat using a telephoto lens of 165mm. A telephoto lens compresses an image. It makes things that are farther away appear closer to the object in the foreground. This is the approximate lens setting I used for my pics posted in “This could be dangerous.” I chose it because Hollywood portrait photographers would use a similar one for publicity shots. It is more flattering for people because their nose will look smaller and it brings their ears into proportion.
Why is this important to those who study the intricacies of the fedora? Because in film different scenes call for different lenses that give sometimes distorted views of our object of admiration. If you’ve watched the IJ Bonus Features DVD, you’ll notice Spielberg talking about using a telephoto lens on the boat/propeller scene, so they could keep the actors out of harms way while making it look like they were about to get chopped to bits.
This Lens phenomenon affects many other items as well, but since we seem a bit obsessed with the hat, we tend to focus on it alone.
I hope you find this info useful in your own endeavors to create the fedoras of your dreams.
Good Luck
Inexpensive Jones
