15-762

Dmitriy Solomonov

Project 0: Vertigo Effect

The camera that I used on this project was a Canon PowerShot S230. It is 3.2 megapixel camera with a 2x optical zoom. To be completely honest, the reason for choosing this particular camera was because it was the only camera that is readily available to me. One down side to using this camera is that it has a limited optical zoom capability; therefore I had to perform the camera effect on smaller objects at closer distances to be able to replicate the effect. On a side note, I do not own a tripod and do not have surgeon’s hands, so the centering of my objects was not as exact as I would have liked them. Unfortunately, I became impatient with retaking pictures of the same scene, and so the imperfections are still present.

 

That aside, I really liked the movie Goodfellas, so in tribute the dolly zoom effect used by the window in the café, I made both my sets in front of windows. I therefore used the windows in my apartment due to their close proximity to my computer. The first scene is of utensils on my kitchen table and the second is of my floor fan in front of the living room window.

 

The first effect taking place in the kitchen involves first moving away from the window while zooming in, then moving the utensils forward and moving towards the window while  zooming out. I turned the utensils by 90 degrees before moving so that the movement would be more explicit. The second effect moved the camera back while zooming it in. I used Photoshop to make animated GIF’s of the effects.

 

Using the fan as reference, the FOV of the camera was calculated to be 26 at no zoom and 13 degrees at full zoom. The fan was 22” across and the min/max distances were 4 feet and 8 feet.