Author Art Adams

Director of photography Art Adams knew he wanted to look through cameras for a living at the age of 12. After ten years in Hollywood working on feature films, TV series, commercials, music videos, visual effects and docs he returned to his native San Francisco Bay Area, where he currently shoots commercials and high-end corporate marketing and branding projects.   When Art isn’t shooting he consults on product design and marketing for a number of motion picture equipment manufacturers. His clients have included Sony, Arri, Canon, Tiffen, Schneider Optics, PRG, Cineo Lighting, Element Labs, Sound Devices and DSC Labs.   His writing has appeared in HD Video Pro, American Cinematographer, Australian Cinematographer, Camera Operator Magazine and ProVideo Coalition. He is a current member of the International Cinematographers Guild, and a past active member of the SOC and SMPTE.

Lighting
The Joys of Lighting Flat

There’s one place in every set that’s never going to be seen, and that’s directly behind the camera. Light from this direction is generally considered uninteresting but if you have a nuanced eye you can create some really interesting looks by putting a light in the one spot that every film school teaches students to avoid.

Lighting direction is important, but so is the size of the source. A small non-diffused light placed directly behind the camera is generally doesn’t work well because it makes people and things look obviously lit. There are situations where this kind of lighting does work–we see it all the time in older movies when a female star has to look her best–but for modern work it feels a bit forced.

Optical Science
The Pitfalls of Anamorphic

Focus is a huge issue in anamorphic, and everyone on the camera crew has to wrap their heads around which focal length lens does what. For example, in spherical cinematography a 50mm lens delivers a “normal” perspective, but in anamorphic the closest to this is the 80mm. The reason for this is that each anamorphic lens is really two lenses in one: it’s 80mm tall but 40mm wide, for a 2:1 squeeze. A spherical 40mm lens isn’t all that long and focus isn’t that big a deal in the horizontal axis, but the addition of an 80mm lens to the vertical axis cuts depth of field in half. A 40mm spherical lens has reasonable depth of field, but add an 80mm lens into that mix and suddenly you have to pay a LOT of attention just to make sure medium shots are in focus.

Ultra HD
My Week Shooting 4K with an FS700 Prototype

Adam Wilt and I have had a 4K-enabled Sony FS700 to play with for a week. Come see what we’ve discovered about the latest entry into the 4K race to high resolution history. The FS700 has a lot in common with this camera — the Bell & Howell 2709 hand-cranked silent film camera (pictured right). It is 90 years old and it still works. I’m not saying that the FS700 is old or obsolete or can’t record sound; rather, I’m saying that, like the FS700, it’s possible to make beautiful images with the 2709 if you know what you’re doing. Adam and I will be presenting a 90 minute talk about shooting 4K on the FS700 this week at CineGear in Los Angeles. If you’re attending, please stop by the Sherry Lansing Theater at 2:15 on Saturday, June 1st.

Post Production
Making the Sony F55 Look “Filmic” with Resolve 9

I’ve spent a long time learning to make HD footage look “filmic” without really knowing exactly what that meant. I’ve just picked up a bit of insight, however, and it’s permanently changed how I look at video and color. I’ve shot a number of projects using an Arri Alexa in WYSIWYG mode — for which I’m considered a bit of an oddity — but with it I can get great results with no more than minimal grading and clients love walking away with ProRes files whose look is 90% there. My problem is that I now have to do this with other cameras as Alexa’s price point is considered “high” in my market due to the release of several newer, cheaper and fairly capable cameras. I love the Alexa look, but my current task is to figure out how to get close to that look when the production doesn’t have the budget to rent one — or, more likely, in the event the production company owns their own camera.

Lighting
Relaying Light: Using Diffusion to “Fix” Natural Light

Diffusion doesn’t just soften light; it relays light. Here’s how I used a large piece of dense diffusion to light the inside of a car and hide the little known fact that the sun moves.

This spot was the first in a series of six that I shot two years ago for OnLive, a company that specializes in streaming gameplay over the Internet. They went through some rough times but now they’re back and they’ve decided to release these spots as part of a new ad campaign.

My lighting budget had to cover the needs of all six spots over five days, so I had to build an equipment package that worked for everything. This car was the only location that would normally have required some big lights to balance a dark car interior with a day-lit exterior and keep the quality and direction of light consistent over time, but we didn’t have the money for a generator and a couple of large HMIs. Fortunately I had two tricks up my sleeve: an Arri Alexa and a 12’x12′ frame of full grid cloth.

Canon EOS
Shooting 4K with the Canon C500: It’s All in the Details

I was initially thrown by the waveform display, which reflects the levels of the underlying log-encoded raw data at all times. Due to the log encoding most of the data was compressed toward the middle of the dynamic range, which is typical for a log curve, but that made it difficult to see what was happening to individual objects, like faces. Over time I learned that all I had to pay attention to was highlight clipping. If I set the exposure by eye based on what I saw in the onboard LCD and then checked that the clipped highlights were the ones I expected to be clipped (there’s always something clipped in a dark forest, usually the sky), I knew I had more than enough to work with in post. And I really liked the quality of the clipped highlights: they were white but not zingy, electronic white, similar to what I see on the Canon 5D Mk. III.

1 … 5 6 7 8