52 Week Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge Week 8: Landscape - Wide Angle Panorama

This week's landscape timed out perfectly with my random moods to go places! So as it happened, I took a little day trip to Fort Collins (only a 45 minute drive from where I live) for the sole purpose of getting out with my camera and filming. 

While I was up roaming around, I decided that I wanted to get some footage up at Horsetooth Reservoir and there ya have it folks...this week's shot!

I got really lucky when I went to the Reservoir to film because just before I got to where this was filmed it had been quite overcast. But luck has a way of finding those that need it and the clouds cleared up enough to let through some sun!

So let's go ahead and watch this week's video then we'll talk about how it was filmed.

Yet another week that I decided to film with my BMPCC! I shot this in 1080 30P with compressed cinemaDNG RAW, a 15 degree shutter at 200ASA and my iris set to a nice f8.0.

To start I have to say I do like how this shot turned out a lot, but hindsight being 20/20, I do wish I had used a circular polarizer to reduce some of  the sun's glare on the water and make the clouds pop a bit more. 

There were two major challenges that I ran into while filming this. The first was just getting to the location. As it would turn out, all of the places that I used to be able to easily park around the reservoir all require a parking pass now. Lame.

Now I'm not saying that I parked there without a pass....but I'm not NOT saying that I did. I plead the 5th. But once I was able to get parked I decided that maybe I would go for a quicker shoot and go handheld rather than on sticks. 

This ended up being a great idea anyways because of challenge number two. The wind was picking up while the temperature was dropping so I didn't feel up to staying at one spot very long anyways. 

The wind caused issues for shooting handheld though because no matter what I did I couldn't stop myself from swaying which obviously then translated into the footage. I tried everything, squatting down, leaning into the wind, using rocks as stabilizers, but all to no avail.

Luckily I was being smart and shot at a higher frame rate and shutter angle so the footage did very well with some stabilization added in post. This also ended up being a small blessing in disguise actually!

When I filmed this I shot it with my lens at about 30mm. While there was no visible vignetting from the anamorphic lens that I saw at the time, it turned out that one corner did show some vignetting. 

The sun was coming in at just the right angle that it reflected on the barrel of the anamorphic lens causing only one corner of the frame to have a very light vignette protruding in.

That's where the stabilization helped because it of course cropped in ever so slightly which was just enough to hide the vignette. 

Now my favorite part of this shoot was the color. The way that the mountains, trees, and water all came out with a bit of color grading just made me giddy. What can I say, I'm a sucker for color grading. 

I just love how the image can have such nice areas of warmth and coolness all in the same image without clashing. Just great really. 

Well that's about all I have to say about this week! Make sure to share your images or videos for this week's shoot in the comments below!