Welcome back for another weekly installment in the 52 Week Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge! Six weeks down, 48 to go! So this week the assignment was candy. I like candy. I like eating candy. I like the way candy makes me feel...makes me feel gooood! Well that escalated quickly! So anyways, for this assignment the instructions said that the motivation of the image should be something sweet and that it would be a good time to bust out a macro lens. So that's what I did. I got myself a couple bags of gummy bears and busted out my now trustee +2 FOTGA macro lens attachment. Without further ado, I give you the anamorphic candy! So I shot this on my BMPCC...again. 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. In order to get a close enough minimum focus distance I used my +2 FOTGA macro lens attachment (in case you weren't paying attention earlier when I said that).
For the crystal fixtures I used a Waterford Crystal bowl and a crystal whisky glass that I honestly don't know the brand of. It's cheap. I only specify the crystal branding because you can see the visual difference between the two.
I was kind of hung up on whether or not to do camera motion or have the candy moving. In the end I decided to go with camera motion due to how I was staging the candy. I tried at first simply manually moving the slider but couldn't consistently get a slow enough motion for my perfectionist ass. So I decided to go with the smart choice, motorized control! The biggest challenge that I ran into with this entire shoot was distance. Distance between the two crystal fixtures and the distance to the backdrop. I ran into issues with the field of view from the anamorphic lens and having the edges of the backdrop popping into view. The other distance issue I had was the distance between the fixtures. I went through about three different stagings before finally finding the one that I liked. It created a nice subtle change in focus between the two different fixtures and the candy itself. This was difficult due to the depth of field from shooting at an f11. But in the end I was able to get a nice looking shot with some really cool flaring if I say so myself! But the best part of the whole shoot? Getting to eat the gummy bears at the end, duh! Can you say f**k yeah! So as always, please participate in a 52 week photography or cinematography challenge, and please share your images here in the comments! I would really love to see some other cinematographers out there joining in!
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This week was fun but challenging. I ran into a few different challenges but the first wasn't such a bad challenge. First I had to decide on where to film. I went through around 5 different locations that I have been wanting to film and finally ended up deciding on this church. I have lived in the same apartment for going on three years, and in that time I have seen this church at the top of a hill in the distance and have always thought to myself "I bet that would be a beautiful location to film." Yet I'd never even bothered to drive up to it! I knew even from a distance that this would be a great high contrast location, and it turned out to be better than I even imagined! The way that the shadows cast across the stone of the church and how dark the trees are against the bright sky. So enough chit chat, let's watch the video! As all the other weeks went, I shot this on my BMPCC. It was filmed in 1080 30P compressed CinemaDNG RAW, 400ASA, 45 degree shutter, with my vintage Kamero 35mm SLR lens at f16 with the adapted B&L 2X Anamorphic Projector lens attached.
For this shoot I went in late morning so that the sun would be up high enough to cast good shadows across the church rather than just blast the front with harsh but even light. I set this up using my 46 inch slider, ikan hi hat riser, and a Manfrotto 502HD fluid head. This was the biggest pain in the...I mean challenge that I encountered. As it turns out, shooting with a top heavy tripod head/camera rig on a hi hat all mounted to a cheap aluminum slider does not make for steady movement. On the contrary, I had to fight to get a single usable shot. Otherwise all I got was bouncy, unsteady shots that looked awful. In the end, I got one really good shot with very minimal movement. This made it easy to stabilize in post. This is also the reason that I shot at 30fps and finished at 24fps. That 20% reduction in speed did wonders in combination with stabilization to make for a nice smooth shot. This shoot was also the final motivating factor to build myself a nice heavy duty rail slider system. My favorite thing about this shot though is in fact the camera movement. Since the church was a good 100 yards away but the tree in the foreground was only about 10 feet, I got a great effect of the church almost not moving at all while the tree seems to be almost the only thing moving. I also really like how high contrast the clouds turned out. Since the sun was so bright, some of the clouds simply washed away to even white color, while others highlighted the gray that was in them to begin with. It also created a nice look of the sky coming through in the darker gray created by the black and white color grade. This color grade was actually something that I created for an actual in color version of the shot rather than black and white. It was only once the grade was done that I simply dropped the saturation to zero and got a fantastic look. I first tried preset black and white looks that are included in Premiere, but none of them created a look that I liked. They would either crush the blacks or blow out the whites; there wasn't a good balance of color. As we all know, a good black and white still really relies on the balance of colors to get a good image. That's it for this week, make sure to come back next week! If you're also doing a 52 Week Photography or Cinematography Challenge, please share you image or video in the comments below, I would really love to see other peoples work! Another week in the books for the 52 Week Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge! This is week four and the assignment was Portrait: Headshot with the instructions being "You shot a selfie, now shoot a "selfie" of someone else!". For this shoot I decided to film outside my apartment building in front of a brick wall that made for a great background. My good friend Ryan McKiernan was kind enough to be my model for this week. This was a great opportunity for me to test out how the anamorphic lens makes skin tones look at a medium aperture. So without further ado, let's take a look at the video for week four! I shot this with my BMPCC in 1080 30P compressed CinemaDNG RAW, 400ASA, 150 degree shutter, with my vintage Kamero 35mm SLR lens at f5.6 with the adapted B&L 2X Anamorphic Projector lens attached.
I set up this shot at night so that even though I lit it to be relatively bright, it would still maintain a harsher look lighting wise. I didn't want everything to be evenly lit, I wanted to still have small shadows showing texture and contrast. To light this I used a pretty simple set up. I had two 500watt halogen work lights lighting the scene. One was pretty close to the side of Ryan, so I put up a scrim in front of it to soften that light. The other light was a bit further away and had no diffusion so that it would remain a harder light. For additional texture I decided to have Ryan smoking a cigarette. This added in the texture of the paper, the burning cherry and ash, and then of course the smoke. I also really liked how this shot turned out because it gets a nice sharp shot of him lighting his smoke before tilting up over his face. Right off the bat I knew that I wanted this shot to have the slightly uncomfortable feel of direct eye contact so I had Ryan look directly into the camera at all times. This also fit the requirement (in my opinion at least) of this being a headshot better than if he were to be looking off elsewhere in the frame. This week was also filmed using the FOTGA +2 Macro lens attachment that was used last week to achieve a closer minimum focus distance. I can not say truly how impressed I actually am with this macro lens. It cost me $6 and yet it shoots great, sharp images and doesn't introduce a butt-load of Chromatic Aberrations! A miracle I tell you! Okay enough promoting of the macro lens, onward with the shoot! This did make it slightly challenging to get as much of Ryan's face in frame as I had originally envisioned, but in the end I really like the way that the shot turned out. I was also surprised by how shallow the depth of field was even shooting at f5.6. I did a test shot without the macro lens and the depth of field was definitely far from shallow, so obviously it was due to the lens attachment. But that doesn't change my level of surprise when I reviewed the footage. Now of course the depth of field is still not very shallow compared to if I had shot at f2.8 or had been using a faster lens, but none the less it came out looking really good. I also noticed that when using the macro lens attachment, the background tends to fall off in the focus quickly, but the focus on Ryan wasn't very shallow. His hands and face were at different distances from the camera but were both sharp and in focus. When you look at his torso you can see that it is slightly soft but still relatively in focus until the very back edges of his shoulders. The more that I shoot with this anamorphic lens set up, not only do I fall more in love with the anamorphic look, but I have been more and more impressed by the BMPCC. This camera is phenomenal. The images that come out of it in 1080 are 100% better looking than those that come out of my DSLR. If you are participating in the 52 Week Photography Challenge or are doing your own Cinematography Challenge, please post this week's shot in the comments below! Week 3 of the 52 Week Photography Challenge created an interesting challenge in its assignment. This week was in the Artistic category with the focus on something red. The instructions for this assignment specifically were “Shoot whatever inspires you. Red should be the focus of the image. Don't be afraid to be creative.” I had to think pretty hard on what I could shoot that was red that I felt inspired to shoot. What I came up with was shoes, and not just any shoes, but hightops. For anyone who doesn’t know me, I have a small obsession with shoes, especially when they are hightops. So getting a pair of bright red hightops to shoot consisted of as much effort as it took to walk to my bedroom and grab a shoebox off the shelf. Okay enough gab, let’s check out the video now. Enjoy! I shot this with my BMPCC in 1080 30P compressed CinemaDNG RAW, 400ASA, 120 degree shutter, with my vintage Kamero 35mm SLR lens at f2.8 with the adapted B&L 2X Anamorphic Projector lens attached.
I had two main challenges that I ran into with this shoot:
Due to shooting this in my living room I ran into the issue of reflecting light. This meant that I had some trouble controlling it enough to make sure that the background of the shot would be dark enough that it wouldn’t be obvious that it was in my living room. The other challenge was getting the shoe to rotate smoothly. I don’t own a photography turntable so I found a lazy susan bearing in my random junk bin and rigged it with a section of paracord. I then wound the paracord around the bearing so that I could simply pull it and spin the shoe. This did work, but it took many takes to get a relatively even and smooth rotation. I ended up wrapping the paracord around the lightstand that I had next to me then pulled the paracord. This meant I had to pull harder to get it to move slowly which ended up giving me a smoother rotation. In previous weeks I’ve talked about how it is not suggested to shoot at a low F Stop with this lens setup because some say it will lack in sharpness. I tested this shot in f2.8, 4.0, and 5.6 before deciding on f2.8 for the final shot. I chose this for two main reasons: The bokeh was smoother and the depth of field was more shallow. I got especially lucky for this shoot because I finally got the +2 macro lens attachment that I ordered from FOTGA about a month ago on the day of this shoot. This meant I could get a nice close up for the shot, showing all of the texture on the shoes and getting a nice shallow depth of field. Since the anamorphic lens I’m using has a minimum focus distance of twelve feet, the macro lens attachment that I got moved that to be approximately 2-3 feet away. This made a crazy difference compared to my past shots with this lens set up. It also appeared to make the image slightly more sharp at the lower F Stop. To create an interesting background (and also because I finally had shallow depth of field) I used christmas/string lights on a backdrop stand in the background. This made for the overall image more interesting while also giving it a city backdrop sort of feel. As soon as I set it up, I fell in love with the way that the soft edges of the shoe were overlapped by the bokeh behind them. Next time that I try a shoot like this, I might go for a single bare bulb in the background and utilize the anamorphic flaring that I personally really like. If you are participating in the 52 Week Photography Challenge or are doing your own 52 Week Cinematography Challenge, please post your shot for week 3 in the comments below! To see every week's subject and instructions make sure to check out the Dogwood Photography blog post. 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? 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! |
AuthorAlan Meyer is an experienced cinematographer, but is no stranger to writing. Archives
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