Is bounce light really just about aiming a light at a white card and walking away? No. There are a couple of tricks to getting the most out of your bounce source, and I can show them to you fairly quickly using a 4’x4’ bounce card as an example.

There are few things more elegant than lighting a shot with a single light source. It doesn’t always work, but when it does—it’s magical.

This book is not for everyone. If you don’t eat, breathe and live cinematography… maybe you should read something else. Seriously. This book may not be for you. (But if it is… you’d better not miss it.)

In this article I wrote about classical key light placement and classical portraiture to illustrate how artists and cinematographers have traditionally gone about lighting faces. Fill light is often derided as the light that simply opens up the shadows, but it can do much more than that. It can have a shape and beauty all its own, and it can save you when your key light placement is not optimal.

It’s one thing to understand that soft sources make soft shadows. It’s another thing to understand why. Fortunately a friend from the insect world can help us if we will look at soft light through his eyes.

In a previous article I described how to place a hard key light. In this article I’ll look at why soft sources are a bit more realistic in color cinematography, require less precise placement, and can help define the volume of a space.

Here’s the deal: there’s this thing called “pulse width modulation,” and under certain conditions it doesn’t play well with rolling shutter cameras. Most of the time it’s no problem, but we don’t get phone calls from post when there’s no problem. Here’s how to avoid that phone call.

The most important thing you will ever learn about lighting is this: LIGHTING IS NOT A FORMULA. Learning about lighting, though, is a process of becoming aware, and in this first of many articles I’m going I’m going to try to increase your awareness of one specific thing per article. The more awareness you have the more easily you’ll be able to adapt your lighting to your circumstances because you’ll see, with your own eyes, what you need to do to make an image that satisfies your inner artist.

I think the best place to start is with classical key light placement. This knowledge is not something you will use verbatim as this is not a style that is in vogue at the moment. The underlying principles, however, should be of daily benefit.

For a long time my primary source of employment was shooting corporate marketing communications videos. As these consist primarily of “talking head” interviews, I tried every lighting setup I could think of to make people look their best quickly, as many of these shoots have tight schedules and not much turnaround time between interviews. This setup is the result of years of experimentation.

Technology is always advancing, and we’re at the point in this industry where we’ll always have new toys on the near horizon. My question is: how much do these toys matter when it’s the people who use them who provide all the creativity?

The day I stop learning about lighting will be the day my EKG goes flatline. There’s an extraordinary amount to learn and absorb, and I doubt I’ll ever learn all of it. That’s okay, because it means I’ll never run out of new things to learn. My most recent fixation is on the one light many think about the least: the fill light.

One of the best things about this business is that greatness lurks around every corner. If you are resourceful and creative you’ll find it well enough.

Izzy Hyman, of the website Izzy Video, interviewed me yesterday for his “Meet the Shooter” series.

Over time I’ve come to respect the Canon 5D. It’s not the most user friendly of cameras, and it has some fairly serious faults, but if you can avoid the pitfalls it can make very pretty images.

It wasn’t until I worked at the DSC Labs booth at NAB that I discovered The Hawk… and it blew me away. It’s a very simple chart, but it offers a colorist (professional or amateur) the most critical information necessary to accurately neutralize your raw, log, or even WYSIWYG images.

Originally slated to be a web-only spot, the first shoot day went so well that when the client saw the results they ordered a second shoot day, added an actor and made a $1m+ national ad buy.

The client wanted contrasty toplight against seamless white, and then they wanted to intercut that with stock footage shot on film. Thanks to Arri’s Alexa, what the client wants—the client gets. In spades.

I’m constantly amazed at how many readers I have, and if you’d like to amaze me more by stopping by and saying hi I’ll be in the DSC Labs booth (C10215, near Band Pro, Tiffen and Abel Cine) on Monday and Tuesday, with shorter appearances Wednesday and Thursday as I’ll be wandering around a bit more. I’m also on a DP Track panel with Geoff Boyle, FBKS, Roberto Schafer, ASC and Michael Bravin on Sunday in room 258, which I’m told is to the rear of the north hall, second floor.

And for those of you who are on the Cinematography Mailing List, I’ll be at the CML Party Tuesday night—although I’ll probably stop by the latest camera assessment screening first.

See you at NAB!

Slate training was my introduction to one of the most important tenets of filmmaking: always think of the next person down the production line. In the case of slating, this means taking care of the poor assistant editor who has to sync and track dailies based on your notes and your slating technique.

It seems everyone and their sister’s friend’s cousin has made a list of indispensable cinematography iPhone apps. Now it’s my turn. Let’s see how original I am.

The Panasonic AF-100 is getting a lot of buzz as a possible HDSLR killer. We used it in the real world in place of an HDSLR, and now we know. And soon, so will you. Read on…

This is my response to a question posted to the Cinematography Mailing List by a young film student who is chafing at the bit to be a director of photography as soon as possible.

A while back I wrote this article about some high speed tests I did in preparation for an upcoming regional spot. The results convinced the client, Rambus, that the extra expense of shooting their upcoming spots at 1000fps was well worth it.

My previous Arri Alexa article showed you how the camera’s dynamic range responds to different ISO settings. In this shorter article I’ll show you why that’s useful and practical information.

Knowing that the Arri Alexa has 15 or so stops of dynamic range is nice, but it’s hardly useful information unless you know how those stops are arranged at different ISO settings. Fortunately I’ve done the hard work for you.

This entry is a guide to my best articles, sorted by topic. Enjoy!

The Canon 5D does a remarkable job of making HD images, considering that it was originally never intended to do so. So how much dynamic range can it really capture? Thanks to the DSC 102db (17-stop) latitude chart, we now have an objective answer.

My dream HD camera records footage with log-encoded gamma to ProRes for a fast, easy and accessible post workflow and cost-effective color grading. It has the simplest control interface ever. It sees in the dark. And it’s built by a company whose gear I learned to trust early in my career when I started out as a camera assistant. The company is ARRI, and the camera is Alexa.