52 Week Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge Week 22: Portrait - Hands

This shot comes to you one week late with the knowledge that we will be 100% caught up this week! The prompt for this week was to shoot a portrait where the hands were the primary focus of the shot.

So for this shot it meant that I could do a pretty standard portrait that put emphasis on the hands, or I could shoot something that REALLY focused on the hands. I obviously went with the latter of the two options.

Let's take a look at this video showing a great slow motion shot of hands at work with an acoustic guitar!

It seems that I truly have a new favorite camera for shooting with as this week was shot again on the Sony a6300! I decided to have some fun with this shot and shoot it in slow motion.

The exact specs were shooting at 1080 120/24p, 6400 ISO, 1/1600 shutter, at f4.0 using a Canon 75-300mm lens and of course the B&L vintage anamorphic projector lens. 

For this shot I decided to use a single 750 watt continuous light with barn doors limiting the light to basically be only on the guitar. I then set up a reflector on the other side bouncing in just a little bit of light to fill the shadows on the hands, but I wanted to make sure to get a good high contrast look to the shot. 

I also had to use bright lighting to compensate for filming at a high frame rate. I wanted to get the movement of the strings captured as best as possible so I shot with a 1/1600 shutter. This also meant that even with the bright lighting I had to open up the aperture of the lens.

To make sure that I had good focus with the lens being opened up like it was, I focused while the lens was stopped down first.

Since I shot this as close up as I did, I had to use a +2 macro lens attachment which helped the shot come out with a nice shallow depth of field when combined with the f4 aperture. I also like how the image came out just a bit soft because it helps rid it of the digital look. 

The hardest part of shooting this was getting the slider positioned just right. I had it tilted slightly so that the camera would tilt up just a bit due to the fact that I mounted the camera directly to the slider. 

But this was another shoot where the unique design of the ProMediaGear slider comes in really handy. The slider is curved on one side to add additional motion to the footage as it doesn't simply move the camera side to side.

The direction that the camera is pointing changes slightly while it moves in the partially circular motion. 

Overall I am really happy about how this shot turned out and look forward to sharing next week's shot with you all! 

As always, please share your image for this week's shot in the comments below if you are participating in a weekly photography or cinematography challenge.