52 Week Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge Week 17: Landscape - Urbanscape

Ah I love the feeling of being all caught up, well with at least one thing in my life! This is the shot for this week, week 17 of 52. This was another one of those weeks that I didn't have to sit and ponder what I was going to film. I already knew. 

The prompt for this week was to shoot a landscape showing off an urbanscape. The exact prompt was "Most Landscapes are wide open spaces of natural beauty... this week find the beauty of the urbanscape/cityscape."

So for this week I went to a place that holds a place in many a Denver citizen's heart, Lakeside Amusement Park. What could be better than all of  the lines of an old wooden roller coaster at a classic amusement park? 

So let's take a peek at this week's video then get into further details. 

This week was shot with the BMPCC in 1080 30P compressed cinemaDNG RAW, at f5.6, 45 degree shutter, 200asa with the B&L Anamorphic Projector lens attached to a Sigma 18-50mm lens at 50mm.

I decided on the Lakeside Amusement Park because it has a great classic wooden roller coaster. Once I got there, I picked my shot location for it's proximity to the highway on ramp that is right next to the park. 

I knew I was going to shoot with some sort of camera movement and wanted to get just a bit of the highway in the background as I moved the focus of the shot to the roller coaster. I just felt that nothing is more fitting of an urbanscape than a highway. 

But I didn't want that to be the focus, in fact I wanted it to be subtle, so all you actually see of the high way on ramp is the curve of it at the beginning of the shot. 

I also really like how the mountains turned out in the background. There was a storm starting to roll in way off in the distance so the haziness caused the mountains to blur together into a bluish silhouette with an almost water color look.

I also like all the texture that came out of the clouds. In the raw shot, they are actually quite bland and blended together, but with my favorite vintage kodachrome emulating LUT, they really came out nicely.

Now my least favorite part of this shot/shoot was the traffic. I could not get a steady break in traffic long enough to get the shot with no cars. Normally this wouldn't bother me that much, but I really don't like how the cars show off the rolling shutter of the camera.

As anyone who has ever shot on the pocket cinema camera knows, the rolling shutter on it is absolutely awful. Anything moving that fast, like I don't know maybe cars, will come out looking slanted. 

I even tried using rolling shutter repair to make the cars look less angled, but it was a no go. Did literally nothing to make them look better. So I said screw it, I like the shot enough even with the cars that I can let my perfectionism go long enough to export the clip.

The other tough thing that I had to deal with while filming this was the sun. Although there were tons of clouds off in the background, there were none providing any relief from the very harsh sunlight. 

This means that any fine lines or really bright areas will become victim to the anamorphic projector lens' chromatic aberrations issue that I have noted before. The only plus to this lens is that it tends to give a better highlight rolloff than any of my other lenses.

This is good because that is another area the pocket cinema camera lacks in, highlight rolloff. It does not create soft rolloffs whatsoever. In fact, I've noticed that my little Canon t3i DSLR has better highlight rolloff than the pocket cinema camera.

But I just love that 13 stop dynamic range and shooting raw too much to use my DSLR over the pocket cinema camera. 

So that's all for this week. I hope to see you next week! If you're participating in a 52 week photography or cinematography challenge, please share your image for this week in the comments below!