52 Week Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge WEEK 2: Traditional Landscape

Ahhh, an assignment that I was excited for right off the bat. For this week, I didn't even have to think to know exactly what I wanted to shoot. Living in Colorado we have so many different beautiful landscapes, but this was one that had been calling out to me for a long time. This shot looking out at the mountains was done from a scenic overlook just before entering Boulder Colorado.

​I shot this early at 7:20 in the morning, but I got there at 6:50 which was the biggest difficulty in and of itself. The car thermometer said it was 38 degrees out so not too cold, until I found out what my real challenge for the day was....wind. It was so windy I could barely open the car door.

But who cares about the weather right?
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So anyways, on to the video. You can view the clip for this week below:

This was shot on the BMPCC in 1080 24p Compressed CinemaDNG RAW, 800ASA, f18, shutter at 180 degrees. 

For this shot I decided to use my Canon nifty 50 (Canon 50mm f1.8 for those unfamiliar) with the B&L Anamorphic Projector Lens. I chose this lens for it's focal length, sharpness, and focusing past infinity. This ended up being a great lens choice for focal length and provided a great learning opportunity for me.

​Normally I just use it at f1.8 on the BMPCC because I don't have an adapter that adapts electronic functions. This means that the iris is always stuck all the way open. That is unless you remove the lens from a Canon camera (such as my DSLR) while in aperture priority mode.

This was fantastic as it let me set the lens for my desired F stop of f18. I shot at f18 to get a nice deep depth of field to really show off all the different edges and peaks to the mountains. I wanted to get all of the details without losing anything into blurry backgrounds. 

The hardest thing for this shoot was really just the wind. If there had been no wind then the only big challenge would have been how to capture the mountain range. But the wind was so bad that I couldn't even get a steady shot despite being on a tripod. Since the wind was blowing away from the mountains, it was blowing directly into my camera.

​No matter what I tried, I could not get the camera to remain 100% steady unless there was a lull in the wind. The reason this shake was so noticeable was due to the fact I was shooting on a 50mm lens. On most cameras that would still be wide enough to not be too noticeable, but on the BMPCC it is the equivalent of approximately a 144mm lens.

Without image stabilization in lens (which of course the nifty 50 does not have) the image then would shake in the background with the smallest of movements of the lens/camera (outside of slow panning/tilting of the tripod head). So to fix it as best as possible I utilized stabilization in post using Warp Stabilizer in Premiere Pro CC. Despite best efforts there was still a bit of shake noticeable in the video.

The video was also sped up to fit into the 15 second time limit that I set for my challenge. This in someways hid the shakes and also made them more obvious.  

All in all I'm happy with the way that this week turned out overall and I look forward to the weeks to come! If you are participating in the 52 Week Photography Challenge or the 52 Week Cinematography Challenge, please share this week's shot in the comments section below, or on our Facebook page at facebook.com/AlanMeyerVideo and be sure to like our page!