BmB said:

Where?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D4qXG8locM

I think you are mistaking zooming for dollying no?

Also no, I do believe fog and haze has been around longer than the Earth, and has been a regular painting technique for many hundreds of years to add depth, particularly to large sceneries and such. I think the haze is clearly visible as a luminous grey colour over the background here:

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/dvd/ep5/duel4.jpg

And in the same shot, I thought the exhaust vents were those red things also visible, and there's a whole ring of them under the vane in the big overview matte. I thought maybe this ring was what Luke fell into. Or maybe the ones he falls in aren't even visible there.

don't try to turn it around to make it look like i don't know what im talking about. You were clearly talking about 3D fog which is a tool in CG and not some natural occurrence in everyday life. You were talking about fog at the bottom of the shaft matte painting, which it clearly isn't.

What you are seeing in the vader pic has nothing to do with added haze but down to the studio environment and studio lights

And you better check again about the exhaust vents. The red ring is not the exhaust vents but lights. have a look at other shots where you see the round vents in a cluster of 6 and you will find the ring of red lights visible in many, but they failed to add them to the vane matte shot

Oh, and i do know the difference between zoom and dolly. I was using the term zoom because that was what you were were using. And even in zoom there is 3D spacial movement and focal change