52 Week Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge Week 18: Artistic - Texture

Welcome back yet again for another week of the Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge! This week is brought to you by our sponsor...oh who am I kidding, what sponsor?! Anyways, let's get right into this week.

This week falls under the category of artistic with the prompt being to shoot texture, specifically, "The artistic inspiration this week is texture. You should almost be able to feel the image."

So I sat and pondered for a bit and had quite a few ideas float through my head before I had the realization that the vintage chair I was sitting in had great texture! The old orange vinyl with the stitching starting to show more with age, it was perfect!

So I threw on a macro lens and got to shooting. Let's check out this week's shot now.

This week was shot with the BMPCC in 1080 30P compressed cinemaDNG RAW, at f5.6, 180 degree shutter, 800asa with the B&L Anamorphic Projector lens attached to a Sigma 18-50mm lens at 35mm.

So let's start off with the negative stuff this week since I've been in a negative mood all day anyways. My first issue with this shoot was really myself. I was having the worst handheld day that I have had in a long time.

I really wanted to shoot this handheld so that I could have movement beyond a pan or tilt. I wanted the camera to be able to move on three axis to add some character. But of course my hands had to have some unnatural shake to them that led to very unsteady footage. 

Even with some warp stabilizer on it in post production I couldn't seem to get it to smooth out at all. In the end I said eff it and went all frozen on it (I let it go).

The next issue I had was deciding on which portion of the shot to use. As I limit myself to 15 second clips I had to pick which portion to use and of course like the beginning and end but not the middle.

I decided to go with the beginning because I really like how much texture shows through on the vinyl. The dirt in the vinyl shows the life that the chair has been through while the stitching also shows up really well. 

The final negative I have for this week was lens mounting. Somehow my anamorphic lens was not 100% lined up with the taking lens and I ended up with a bit of black vignetting. Normally I'm fine with a bit of vignetting but not this time. No, the vignetting was in only one corner. ONE! 

This meant that to hide the REAAAALLY heaving corner vignette that I had to zoom in on the whole image to 105% to hide most of it. Luckily the rest that was left behind was mostly hidden in the darkness of that corner of the frame. 

To get the macro this close I used two macro lenses stacked up, a +1 and a +2 so that I would have a +3 lens. I've played around with my +4 lens before and it was just a bit too much which also meant that the +10 was out. 

The final aspect of this week that I did like though was the surprise texture that showed up in the pillow that was sitting on the chair. I really like how the wool texture came through so well at the end, even if it is only for a second. 

So that's about all I have to say about that. Make sure to come back next week! And as always, if you are taking part in a 52 week challenge whether it is photography or cinematography, please share your shot for this week in the comments below (considering no one ever shares I'm beginning to feel like I'm talking to myself a bit).