Last week I watched Stanley Kubrick's 1975 classic, Barry Lyndon. What a movie! I haven't seen a movie with as gorgeous realistic photography in a while. Kubrick's composition is perfect, every single shot. The lighting and the story telling is awesome.

Barry Lyndon is the story of the life of a curios Irish character, Redmond Barry, who goes onto become the wealthy 'Barry Lyndon'. It is a 3+ hours epic, that is enjoyable right through. Its a nice tale and the way it is told is excellent. A must watch, with some wine and cheese.

As someone with an interest in photography, I am stumped by how Kubrick achieved some of the shots in this movie. The rich colors, the way the light looks... In some ways the film was a bit of a photographer's dream project. Most scenes were shot in natural light - legend has it that the film didn't use much artificial lighting at all. In fact the beautiful candle lit scenes in the movie were shot in actual candle light alone.

Quoting from http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ac/len/page1.htm:

At the very early stages of his preparation for "BARRY LYNDON", Kubrick scoured the world looking for exotic, ultra-fast lenses, because he knew he would be shooting extremely low light level scenes. It was his objective, incredible as it seemed at the time, to photograph candle-lit scenes in old English castles by only the light of the candles themselves! A former still photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick has become extremely knowledgeable with regard to lenses and, in fact, has taught himself every phase of the technical application of his filming equipment. He called one day to ask me if I thought I could fit a Zeiss lens he had procured, which had a focal length of 50mm and a maximum aperture of f/O.7. He sent me the dimensional specifications, and I reported that it was impossible to fit the lens to his BNC because of its large diameter and also because the rear element came within 4mm of the film plane. Stanley, being the meticulous craftsman that he is, would not take 'No" for an answer and persisted until I reluctantly agreed to take a hard look at the problem.

The lens that is spoken of here is one that the famous lens manufacturer Carl Zeiss made for NASA. Not many of us can get our hands on 0.7 aperture lens today, even for still photography. As a matter of fact I don't know of any that are commercially available. Canon's 50mm prime at f/1.8 is 80$ (USD), the f/1.4 version of the lens is about 300$ and there is a L class f/1.2 lens which is about 1,300$. It stops there it doesn't go any lower. Canon once had a f/1.0 lens, which I believe is now discontinued.

Now that I look around, its 2nd on the "Ten Movies Every Photographer Should See" list. The first is, of course, Baraka.