Week 11 is in the bag! The prompt for this week was "Find a way to show your landscape/natural beauty in reflection. The mirror world revealed." To start, this is another week where the location was impacted by wind but for once it ended up being a blessing in disguise. The original location I was going to shoot at was a pond/fountain outside of a hotel in Westminster. But due to the wind, the "wake" on the pond was too much to get a clear reflection of any kind. So I started walking towards another fountain that I had seen near by when I noticed the little creek running along the walking path. As it would turn out, the bridge crossing over the creek would give me the perfect overlook on the creek to get a beautiful reflection of the grass and trees along the side of the creek as well as the sky. So let's move on and watch the video: This week was shot on the BMPCC in 1080 30P compressed cinemaDNG RAW, at f8.0, 180 degree shutter, 200asa with the B&L Anamorphic Projector lens attached to a Sigma 18-50mm lens.
I'm going to start with my favorite thing about this shot. The color. I love that the color came out with such a nice half and half of blue and yellow. Because of the time of year all the grass around the creek was still yellow and the sky was clear enough to reflect blue across the water. This went well with the LUT I used that emulates the color of vintage Kodak Kodachrome. Mmm, vintage color. I'm just going to say, vintage style LUTs are fantastic! I digress... So when I filmed this I decided to just film handheld since I didn't have a location locked down and I really didn't feel like lugging around a tripod in the wind. This ended up going pretty well since I kept the motion minimal and could stabilize the footage in post. A tripod would have been nice though since I was shooting over the railing of a bridge and had to hold the camera up above the railing. So I decided to use the railing as a partial stabilizer so that there wouldn't be so much shake. This was the hardest part though. Even the movement using the railing for stabilizing kept creating awkward movements that didn't quite look right. I also tried shooting with the camera unmoving and doing a regular no movement shot and a time lapse. But neither of these options really looked that good so I kept trying with a moving shot. This was also the reason that I shot at 30fps so that I could slow the footage just slightly. Not only did this lengthen the shot but also gave a smoothing effect to the movement. Honestly this week was pretty straightforward though so I don't have much more to say about the shoot so I'll just end it here. If you are participating in a photography or cinematography challenge, please share this week's shot in the comments below!
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This week's portrait was one that I shot a couple weeks ago in preparation for this week. The description for this week's challenge was this: "Show a subject in their natural habitat. Their place of work or hobby is a great start. Tell their story with the environment"I shot this while I was hanging out in Fort Collins Colorado at a local street skatepark. For those that don't know what that means, it is a dedicated skatepark but instead of ramps it consists of stairs, ledges, and handrails. I figured that if I should show someone in their "natural environment", what better place than a skatepark? So I rolled up there and watched some of the people skate for a bit to see if there was anyone that was any good. There was a group of dudes hanging out skating that were pretty decent, so I asked if I could film them skating and after an hour of filming, had some good shots but none of them actually landing tricks. Since they weren't landing tricks, I just found the one shot that was at least the most interesting and included the best failure. Alright, so let's go ahead and watch the video! In the end, I shot this with my BMPCC out of sheer curiosity. I wanted to see how it handled action sports when shooting at 30fps. Looking back I kind of wish that I had instead filmed on my DSLR at 60fps.
Although I would have had to settle with shooting at 720p instead of 1080, it would have stretched to a nice looking 1080 when stretching for the anamorphic. So the full details for the shoot were that I filmed in 1080 30P compressed cinemaDNG RAW at 200ASA, 15 degree shutter and at f8.0. I shot this using my B&L Anamorphic projector lens on my Sigma 18-50mm lens. There were a few guys going for different tricks so it was a bit difficult deciding on which trick to use. I liked this shot because it starts out with the skateboarder very focused on the trick he is about to attempt. This was the portrait of the whole shot. One of the biggest challenges that I ran into while shooting this was finding a good focus point. Since I was shooting at a relatively high F-stop, I had the advantage of deeper depth of field, but the distance that the skaters were going was far enough to range just slightly in focus. The issue that I have had is that with the minimum focus distance being so far, and the lens I was using have such a small range between infinite focus and 12 feet away, it was not working well when I pulled focus while they skated. So instead, I focused at the middle point of the distance they were skating and for the most part they stayed in focus, but they got soft at the start and finish of the shots. Despite this, I still really like how the shot turned out. The other difficulty that I had was keeping a steady shot. The lens was getting some jittering motion when I would first hit record and hit to stop recording. This made timing a bit difficult if I was hurrying to capture a trick as the camera would continue its shake as I started panning the camera. This is an issue that I have been working on correcting for a while now and I hope to find a solution to implement soon. In the end this was a good learning experience that although I really do love shooting on the pocket cinema camera for its dynamic range and image quality, it is alas no match for action sports. If you are participating in a photography or cinematography challenge, please make sure to share you shots in the comments below and come back next week! Week 9 is in the bag! I have to say, this one was actually a little bit tough. The subject was artistic choice with the subject needing to involve shadows. This was just kind of tough because I had a lot of different ideas, but couldn't decide on which one I liked best. Then I honestly just procrastinated and after everything that I had left to do with my crazy schedule this week, I had to figure out something cool to shoot very much on the spot. That's when it hit me...stair railings! The stairs outside of my apartment are horrendously designed in regards to moving anything bulky up them, but for creating shadows? Pretty perfect. They have metal a metal handrail with lots of bars to create shadows and the stairs are a square "U" shape. This allowed me to set up a 500watt work light to blast light through the rails and create shadows on the walls and steps. So that's enough talk, let's watch! I shot this with the BMPCC in 1080 30P compressed cinemaDNG RAW at f8.0, a shutter angle of 360 degrees, 800ASA, and I used my Sigma 18-50mm lens with the B&L Anamorphic.
The hardest thing about setting up this shot was lighting it. I set up a 500watt work light to have a nice bright warm light source as the light making the shadows. I then set up a continuous 4 bulb fluorescent light with a softbox for a bit of cool light. This was really just to cool the light on the metal rails closest to the camera so that they wouldn't be as warm. I wanted this look so that the highlights would be relatively cool but maintain the warmth of the shadows as they got darker. I decided to go handheld for this shot so that I could adjust the camera position in both height and side to side movement. I didn't want to be limited to rails with panning and tilting. I wanted to be able to compensate for a tilt with the distance between the camera and the ground. The other reason that I liked this shot was from all of the lines created in the image. There are the bars on the railing, the siding of the building, the stairs, and the shadows all creating different lines in the image. I shot this at the widest focal length that the lens allows without vignetting which is about 32mm. The other thing that this did that I actually really like is create slight lens distortions that are visible in the different lines. Since the projector lens is not meant to be used at wider angles it does get noticeable image distortion unlike high end anamorphic cinema lenses. For the purpose of the shadows I decided to really compress the color of the image to each end of the spectrum making the shadows darker and the highlights brighter. Since this was shot handheld, I decided to shoot at 30fps to have the extra data to better be able to add some stabilization in post. This gave it just a bit more of a smooth handheld motion rather than jittery/shaky. Since I shot it exposed more to the left, the color grading led to a slightly noisy image so I also dropped the vibrance down to zero. This takes the color out of the noise which lets the grainy noise of the BMPCC shine. With all of the color of removed from the noise the BMPCC has a nice grain look rather than the ugly noise seen in DSLRs that commonly have the issue of artifacts. So like always, if you are participating in a 52 week photography challenge or cinematography challenge, please share you shots in the comments below! 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! Time for another week of the Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge! So the assignment this week was to do a portrait without showing the subject’s face. This type of shot is actually one of my favorites. There are so many different ways to film someone without showing their face while still expressing a story. You might simply shoot from the back of the subject, you can have them looking away from the camera at something in the background, or their face can actually be hidden by an object such as something they are carrying. For this shot I knew right off the bat that I had to incorporate movement. Whenever I film a faceless portrait type of shot I always like it to be moving. I also have a tendency to shoot this type of shot for slow motion...so that’s what I did for this one! WOOOO! SLO-MO! Without further ado, let us watch! I shot this on my BMPCC once again (I only keep specifying because I’m sure at some point I’ll end up busting out my DSLR).
It was filmed in 1080 24P compressed CinemaDNG RAW, 400ASA, 180 degree shutter, with my vintage Kamero 35mm SLR lens at f11 with the adapted B&L 2X Anamorphic Projector lens attached. The location where this was filmed was one that I’ve had in mind to film at for a while. This week’s subject matter simply stood out to me as a great time to film at these stairs. I like this spot a lot simply because it is a huge set of stairs. This makes for a great background while also creating a lot of motion in a short distance. Because of all the options that this location provided, I ended up shooting a few different shots of varied motion. The motion varied in both how my subject moved, and how/where the camera moved. The biggest challenge of this shoot was the camera motion. This was the first shoot with the anamorphic lens set up in which I went “hand-held’. In order to get a smooth shot for this I decided to utilize a monopod to move my hand away from the camera. This is also one of my favorite riggings because it makes it easy to get great low angle shots by flipping the camera upside down...which is exactly what I did. One thing that I have learned about this system for filming is that in order to get footage that looks stable, I have to have any support being used mounted directly under the lens currently. This is because due to the specialized mounting that I have set up for this adapted lens set-up, there is a mounting point directly under the lens. This basically mounts the lens directly to the support and the rest of the rail system is attached to that mount. I then did the best I could to balance the camera rig on the monopod to create the most stable shot that I could. One other difficulty to add into the challenges section was my brain. I forgot that I wanted to shoot this in 30P for easier slow motion and shot it in 24P. This was therefore a bit more difficult to work with in post, but I made it work. My favorite aspect of this shoot was actually the wind. I hate wind in general, but it made for a nice effect in the video. At first I was worried that the direction that the wind was going wouldn't work well for the shoot, but it ended up coming head on just like I wanted. Thanks Mother Nature! Overall I'm really happy how this shot came out despite the fact that things could have gone better. Again, please share your images or videos here in the comments if you are participating in the 52 week photography/cinematography challenge! I would really love to see some other cinematographers out there joining in! |
AuthorAlan Meyer is an experienced cinematographer, but is no stranger to writing. Archives
June 2016
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