Tag Archives: director of photography

How to become a cinematographer

DSLR film making

 

It safe to agree that taking pictures and film making differ but the term “motion picture” is somehow strongly related to photography.
In other terms, we could say that making films is taking pictures with a motion camera. This art is also known as Cinematography.

What difference is there between the term “cinematographer” and “director of photography” often abbreviated in DP or DoP ? To many, both terms seem quite interchangeable. Some insist that a cinematographer is a DP sitting behind the camera, but this is far from being universally accepted.

C-mount lenses on Micro Four Thirds

One of the great things about the micro four thirds format is that you can simply mount anything on these. It’s just a matter of finding the right adapter, among the variety of available offers. In this particular case, the C-mount to M43 one pictured above is indeed well made, but there are cheaper ones starting from just a few bucks.. Fotodiox comes to mind.
C-mount lenses are still in use,  no longer as 8mm or 16mm cinema lenses as they used to be but as security devices lenses, namely closed circuit television lenses. Normally they are pretty fast lenses as they need to work 24h and they come under the commercial term of TV lenses (from the CCTV acronym).
This is why some may be interested in the vintage C-mounts on a cropped sensor. Fast glass is expensive and C-mounts are not.

GH2, 5DmkII, 5DmkIII, Blackmagic Cinema Camera and Sony A99

 

GH2 panasonic

 

You have certainly noticed that I mostly write about the GH2. I used to own the 5DmkII, it was the first DSLR I shot video with.  It has indeed been the first love for many and still truly is.  But since the coming of the hack for the panny it was sudden divorce for me.
I still love the colors you get out of the Canon,  there is a certain richness and overall dynamic range you simply cannot get out of the GH2.  I feel that the whole color pattern has a grey, duller base throughout the gamma,  with a green bias.
You have to work hard around this in post to make it look great,  but it’ s doable.  I have an upcoming post dedicated to color correction and I will discuss this matter in greater depth soon.  The way your final work looks it’s too much of an important subject to be done  with a few lines.

While there is no doubt the above sticks as a con, 0n the pro side

– the panny it’ s true 1080p as opposed to the lower resolution of the Canon, that claims to be full HD but looks like HD ready (720p)
– magic lantern it’s a very nice addition, but even in its latest incarnation cannot deliver as much as Vitaliy Kiselev  and all his community have so far achieved with Ptools and the patches
– it’ s got a swiveling screen in place of a non sens fixed lcd
– it’ s way cheaper