Category: Blog Posts

Things To Avoid

Courtesy of the fine folks at Aputure, here are five common mistakes made by beginning cinematographers.

The Award Goes To…

Want your film to look like it deserves an Oscar?  In this tutorial, Jordy from Cinecom recreates shots from Darkest Hour, The Shape of Water, Blade Runner 2049, and Dunkirk.  What I love about this video is that it goes through both the filming and color grading aspects of the process.

Very Complementary

Pushing your color grade towards the complementary colors teal and orange is very popular right now – either with the shadows going teal and the highlights going orange or with the shadows and highlights going teal and the midtones going orange.  While the look is definitely trendy, it’s also a legitimately effective way to grade your footage, since it emphasizes the skin tones of your subject.  Here are some explanations and guides to the teal and orange look.

This Post Has Been Flagged

Need a quick refresher on some of the tools for shaping light?  The always-enthusiastic Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens has a great video on how to use flags, silks, and nets to manipulate light.

Best of the Best

Who’s the greatest cinematographer of all time?  While I think there are some names missing from this particular list (Emmanuel Lubezki, Christopher Doyle), it’s a great overview of some of the best in the business.  You’ll never guess who gets the top spot.

It’s Complicated.

There is some debate in the filmmaking community – even among professionals – as to whether sensor-size crop factor should be applied to aperture.  As you may recall, the size of a camera’s sensor affects the apparent focal length of a lens – so, a 25mm lens on a four-thirds sensor has the same field of view as a 50mm lens on a full frame sensor.  Is aperture affected in the same way?

The answer is… sort of.  Aperture is the measure of the size of the opening in the lens through which light enters the camera, which affects brightness and depth of field.  The size of the sensor does not change the size of a lens’s aperture, so the overall brightness does not change.  However, depth of field is directly affected by focal length – long lenses produce a shallower depth of field than short lenses.  So the depth of field (the amount of background blur) is affected by by crop factor since, for example, a 25mm lens will always produce less background blur than a 50mm lens at the same aperture.  In short, depth of field is affected by sensor size (indirectly), but overall brightness is not.

Gromit Gets Lit

Ever wonder how lighting is done on a miniature scale for stop-motion animation?  Check out this video from Cooke Optics.

Transforming the Space

Here’s an informative video from Cinematography Database in which one room is lit for three different looks – sunset, day, and night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDZWTKH8NOE

Driving In My Car, Living Like A Star

Need to film a scene in an automobile?  Check out these tutorials for lighting car interiors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1vJ0y2PBBM

Recreating the Scene

The folks over at The Camera Store TV do some of the best camera reviews on the web, but they sometimes take on more creative projects as well.  Here, watch as they recreate scenes from Goodfellas and Collateral.

Batman to Basic Instinct

Here’s a quick video with some great tips on emulating the lighting from iconic interrogation scenes.

From Zack Snyder to Akira Kurosawa

Courtesy of StudioBinder, here are a few videos that look at how different directors use color schemes and color psychology in their films.

ISO Means What?

Ever been confused by the myriad of strange terms photographers use?  So has everyone who has ever held a camera.  Photo and video gurus Tony and Chelsea Northrup get mad about it in this funny – but painfully accurate – look at some of the least logical photography terms.

The First Rule of Lighting Is…

You might be surprised by how many movies, television shows, and short films take place in offices.  Here’s a quick look at how to recreate some office looks, including the toxic workplace from Fight Club and, of course, the banal-but-ridiculous sitcom setting from The Office.

The Kubrick Effect

Here are a couple of videos that examine the brilliant lighting techniques and cinematography utilized by Stanley Kubrick.  The first looks at Kubrick’s use of practical lights and the second delves into his 1975 classic Barry Lyndon.