52 Week Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge Week 11: Landscape - Reflections

Week 11 is in the bag! The prompt for this week was "Find a way to show your landscape/natural beauty in reflection. The mirror world revealed."

To start, this is another week where the location was impacted by wind but for once it ended up being a blessing in disguise. The original location I was going to shoot at was a pond/fountain outside of a hotel in Westminster. 

But due to the wind, the "wake" on the pond was too much to get a clear reflection of any kind. So I started walking towards another fountain that I had seen near by when I noticed the little creek running along the walking path. 

As it would turn out, the bridge crossing over the creek would give me the perfect overlook on the creek to get a beautiful reflection of the grass and trees along the side of the creek as well as the sky. 

So let's move on and watch the video:

This week was shot on the BMPCC in 1080 30P compressed cinemaDNG RAW, at f8.0, 180 degree shutter, 200asa with the B&L Anamorphic Projector lens attached to a Sigma 18-50mm lens. 

I'm going to start with my favorite thing about this shot. The color. I love that the color came out with such a nice half and half of blue and yellow.

Because of the time of year all the grass around the creek was still yellow and the sky was clear enough to reflect blue across the water. This went well with the LUT I used that emulates the color of vintage Kodak Kodachrome. Mmm, vintage color.

I'm just going to say, vintage style LUTs are fantastic! I digress...

So when I filmed this I decided to just film handheld since I didn't have a location locked down and I really didn't feel like lugging around a tripod in the wind. This ended up going pretty well since I kept the motion minimal and could stabilize the footage in post. 

A tripod would have been nice though since I was shooting over the railing of a bridge and had to hold the camera up above the railing. So I decided to use the railing as a partial stabilizer so that there wouldn't be so much shake. 

This was the hardest part though. Even the movement using the railing for stabilizing kept creating awkward movements that didn't quite look right. I also tried shooting with the camera unmoving and doing a regular no movement shot and a time lapse.

But neither of these options really looked that good so I kept trying with a moving shot. This was also the reason that I shot at 30fps so that I could slow the footage just slightly. Not only did this lengthen the shot but also gave a smoothing effect to the movement. 

Honestly this week was pretty straightforward though so I don't have much more to say about the shoot so I'll just end it here. 

If you are participating in a photography or cinematography challenge, please share this week's shot in the comments below!