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Director of photography John Christian Rosenlund has at least a three-decade history with director Bent Hamer. Their most recent collaboration, The Middle Man, depicts a town in the northern United States during a post-industrial depression. It’s perhaps not a subject instinctively associated with Rosenlund and Hamer’s Norwegian roots, though when we learn that the production is based on a book by Norwegian author Lars Saabye Christensen, the link becomes clear.
Before pandemics and the downsizing at traditional, broadcast news operations, many news and non-fiction DOPs were already assuming a significant role in post-production. Whereas frame rates, f-stops, and the character of our lenses, once formed the backbone of our expertise and practice, DOPs in the non-theatrical realm increasingly find ourselves in a different kind of ditty bag, as correspondent, writer, director, and ersatz editor – all rolled into a one-person-can-do-anything-and-everything mode.
For a long time, selecting camera gear has been fairly easy. For twenty years, digital cinema cameras have never quite had everything we wanted, and the choice often boiled down to comparing the compromises. That’ll always be true to a degree, but for the last year or two it’s felt like we’re arriving somewhere. We can’t have anything, but we can have more than enough, and those compromises are boiling down to a zero-sum game.
It’s perhaps a little unfair to blame modern visual effects people for the fact that audiences are becoming a little jaded about green screen. If we’re to conclude that there’s some sort of quality problem with VFX, we’d need to be sure that we were noticing each and every use, so we know how big the sample is. Many of the applications of VFX, in modern movies, are actually comparatively simple fixes or paint-outs of inappropriate details that nobody ever notices – the boom reflected in a window, the anachronistic sign in a period piece. If we’re not aware of these VFX, they can’t really be objectionable, and we have no idea what proportion of VFX are actually a problem.
There are two components of gamma that have quite different purposes. One of them is always necessary because displays and their surroundings are never equally as bright as the original scene. The other one is a compression technique.
Steeven Petitteville’s background in cinematography begins with the sort of story that many people would like to be able to tell. Petitteville didn’t finish studying at the ESRA film school in Paris, having become too busy working in the camera department to do so. After ten years as a camera assistant, he arrived in Los Angeles to shoot a commercial. Seven years later, he’s still there.
There are a number of reasons why people like old lenses, and they’re all very valid. Cameras and lenses so good they’re invisible are a recent development. Most of the best films ever made, by default, predate today’s spotless pictures, and artists have always been a rebellious bunch in any case. This, though, is an article about why it’s not always a good idea to rebel, at least without knowing exactly what we’re getting ourselves into.
Lets’ start by stating the obvious: TV reporters are not trained lighting designers. When the pandemic hit, stations were forced to figure out new ways of socially distanced, on-air reporting, and initially asked reporters to pick a well-lit room in their house and place a lamp behind the camera to illuminate their face.