Sirui Saturn 50mm T2.9 1.6x Anamorphic – A Review (of sorts) for Landscape Photography
Warning: The following is neither a traditional lens review nor a review for filmmaking! If this will cause distress, please look away now!
I’ve recently been sporting a new lens on the front of my Nikon Z7. It’s small, lightweight, affordable and made by a Chinese manufacturer I’d not not heard of … and it has some extraordinary properties.
The lens in question is the Sirui Saturn 50mm T2.9 1.6x Anamorphic. If you’re a filmmaker, you’ll instantly recognise the telltale signs of a cine lens – the T in the name, cog like focus and aperture rings, aperture and distance markings on the side, and the oval, anamorphic lens, the source of those extraordinary properties. However, my interest is in stills and landscape photography, not movies, so why choose this lens over the many spherical options available? We’ll return to the lens, to anamorphic and to those properties later, except to say that the lens promises a “cinematic look” and it’s that term that piqued my interest because it’s this cinematic look I’m now chasing in my photography.
The Cinematic Look
The term “cinematic look” is an interesting one. What is a cinematic look? Do all films have a cinematic look? There’s no doubt that both Wes Anderson’s Astroid City and Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner are “cinematic”, but it’s difficult to argue that they share a common visual atheistic.
Dig beneath the surface though and you’ll find that the films do have something in common. Both employ a strong visual language deliberately designed to communicate mood, emotion and ideas to the audience. Colour, tone, lighting, atmospheric effects and compositional techniques combine to create a world in which the story takes place. This world isn’t real. When the lights dim and the film starts, day-to-day reality is left behind, instead you’re immersed in a false, alternate and utterly believable reality constructed by the filmmaker. That’s the magic of movies!
Widescreen & Anamorphic
Both movies also share two other important qualities. Both are widescreen and both were filmed using anamorphic lenses.
The now ubiquitous widescreen format was the movie industry’s response to the growing popularity of television. The new format proved an instant hit with audiences, but the industry couldn’t afford to write-off their huge investment in the 35mm, 4:3 format. Anamorphic lenses solved the problem. An anamorphic (as opposed to spherical) lens horizontally “squeezes” a widescreen image onto 35mm film. When projected at the cinema a special lens “desqueezes” it back to widescreen. Though expensive, anamorphic lenses made the widescreen format economically and artistically viable.
Anamorphic lenses also imbued film with more subtle qualities - soft, dreamy, out of focus backgrounds, oval (rather than round) bokeh and horizontal lens flares. Over time, the widescreen format and these anamorphic qualities became part of the unique visual appeal of cinema, in other words the “cinematic look”. Though other ways of producing widescreen films have been available for decades, many filmmakers continue to use anamorphic lenses simply due to that look!
To conclude, a strong visual language, the widescreen format, anamorphic qualities and other important factors such a frame rate, grain and music, all contribute to the “cinematic look”, a look that values storytelling over reality.
Reality in Photography
What’s all this got to do with landscape photography, which (in the main) prizes realism and naturalism above all? It’s not the job of a landscape photographer to create an alternate reality, instead our role is to faithfully reproduce what’s in front of us, and this is what our audience expects. But reality is a slippery concept. When we frame a photograph, when we choose the time of day to photograph, when we select a focal length or dial in an aperture, when we choose a film type or method of development, we’re deliberately making choices about how to represent the landscape. In fact, by choosing when, what and how we photograph, we’re making the same choices as the filmmakers. We’re creating our own version of reality.
Even if we agree that each photograph is real in its own right (in other words no significant post-processing), when we include it in a portfolio of work, for a book, magazine, website or slideshow, does that portfolio represent reality? Do the photos of Swaledale on my website truly reflect the reality of the Yorkshire Dales where more often than not, the light and colour is flat and dull? And if we did attempt to represent reality, quite honestly, would anyone be interested? So, in our own way, we’re manipulating our audience to a greater or lesser extent, telling the story we want them to hear, even if we or they don’t realise it.
The Sirui Saturn 50mm T2.9 1.6x Anamorphic
This, in a roundabout way, brings us back to the Sirui Saturn 50mm T2.9 1.6x Anamorphic, a manual focus lens designed for full frame sensors, which produces widescreen images imbued with those anamorphic qualities. On the 3:2 sensor of my Nikon Z7 it creates images with a 2.4:1 aspect ratio, in other words glorious CinemaScope!
Another way of describing the lens is that it has a focal length of 50mm vertically, but when desqueezed, has a focal length of 31mm horizontally, a sort of standard/wide angle hybrid, combining the advantages of a standard focal length (a shallower depth of field) with those of wide angle. If I add these things together, this is a lens that (a) produces panoramic images without the need to stitch or crop (b) has those all important cinematic traits and (c) allows me to place greater emphasis on the subject whilst being still able to set it within its surroundings. This, for me at least, sounds like a winning formula.
The time I’ve had this lens is far too short to really understand its best use cases, capabilities or to test it in a wide range of situations, and I’m not qualified nor prepared to test its “technical quality” or make comparisons against its spherical brethren. That would be missing the point. What I’m prepared to report is that to date, even after de-squeezing, I’ve found no material issues with image quality (nothing that can’t be easily corrected in post) and that what I see with my (admittedly old) eyes is beautifully rendered, cinematic images, and for me beauty out trumps technical IQ every time. My gut feel is that the lens will excel at night, with a strong subject and a narrow depth of field to maximise those anamorphic qualities.
As you can see from some of these photographs, compositionally it will take some time to discover how to make the most of the widescreen format, but already I’m finding it much more straight forward to compose panoramic images and the easier the process, the more creative you can be. And what a rich vein of source material there is to mine for ideas and inspiration, all those widescreen films made from the 1950’s on!
The lens does come with a few constraints. It’s manual focus (not a problem for landscape), it has a 90cm minimum focusing distance (add a diopter closeup lens), you won’t see the aperture in the viewfinder (it still worked just fine on my Nikon Z7) and it’s not weather sealed (electrical tape). On the other hand, it’s small, lightweight, feels well built and the cog like aperture and focus rings feel smooth.
I bought this lens with an open mind, it really was 50/50 as to whether it would be packed up and returned or find a permanent place in my kit bag, but the Sirui Saturn has not just provided a unique optical option, but opened my eyes to a way of thinking about “cinematic” landscape photography; one which values the communication of mood, atmosphere and story over technical IQ and reality. This doesn’t mean I’m about to embrace AI! I’m a photographer rather than a digital artist and my inspiration is what I see, not what I make up.
Where this journey leads to, I really don’t know, but I’m already looking forward to the snows of winter, the meadows in bloom and the colours of autumn, all rendered in widescreen, anamorphic, cinematic glory.
The Sirui Saturn 50mm T2.9 1.6x Anamorphic is a keeper.
A growing collection of images follow.
