distinction between photography and cinematography

[hye jung lee]

Hello everyone,

I have recently signed up to this site and am thrilled to have found so much discussion and activity concerning our craft. I am a Korean student studying cinematography in Scotland and am writing an essay about the differences between cinematography and photography. I would be very interested to your views on this matter or if you know of any particular articles I should read. I look forward to hearing from you.. Thanks - Hye Jung Lee.

[Paul Bruening]

Movement, movement and movement.

[Chad Stockfleth]

Shutter angle vs. shutter speed, varying framerates, strobe lights vs. constant lights and the art of collaboration would be good places to start.

[Alex Wuijts]

Besides movement, i would say the biggest difference between cinematography and photography is in numbers. One photograph should evoke a fascinating story, while with cinematography, you use thousands of photos to achieve the same effect.

[Sam Wells]

You _can_ make films without collaborators though.

 

(And you can make still photographs with them - a film crew, even: see Gregory Crewsdon)

 

 

A deeper question is, is it "motion motion motion" or "appearance of motion appearance of motion appearance of motion" ? :blink:

 

Anything longer than a short answer here will be very long !

 

-Sam

 

Sam Wells film/.../nj

[Alex Wuijts]

You _can_ make films without collaborators though.

 

(And you can make still photographs with them - a film crew, even: see Gregory Crewsdon)

A deeper question is, is it "motion motion motion" or "appearance of motion appearance of motion appearance of motion" ? :blink:

 

Anything longer than a short answer here will be very long !

 

-Sam

 

Sam Wells film/.../nj

 

Well, i'd go for appearance of motion, but isn't all motion really appearance of motion in our endless universe? *cough*

Edited November 16, 2006 by Alex Wuijts

[George Lekovic]

Well,

 

JLG, elsewhere known as Jean Luc Godard, once said that "Photography is truth" and then added that "Cinema is truth "24 times a second". Michael Haneke, on th other hand, said that "Cinema is 24 leis a second in an effort to represent the truth".

 

I don't know what is the difference really is, but it seems to have something to do with seconds and the number 24.

 

:)

 

George

Edited November 16, 2006 by George Lekovic

[grantsmith]

i think one of the biggest differences is that a cinematograper dosn't just shoot a series of nicely framed compositions. Each shot is composed with the awareness that it will have to 'cut' into another shot fluidly. i.e. continuity of lighting, exposure, screen direction etc.

[Dino Giammattei]

Time

 

Back a million years ago when I was a US Navy Combat Cameraman, we had a friendly war of words with the still photographers. They would say that us mo-pickers would shoot a hundred feet then look for a bar. It was actually the truth for many of them.

 

I would counter that a still photog only has to be a photographer for a hundredth of a second at a time.

 

dino

[Sam Wells]

i think one of the biggest differences is that a cinematograper dosn't just shoot a series of nicely framed compositions. Each shot is composed with the awareness that it will have to 'cut' into another shot fluidly. i.e. continuity of lighting, exposure, screen direction etc.

 

This is true, a good point * -- but then in stills there's things like Minor White's series; Duane Michals used to shoot sequences that were like mini abstract narratives

 

Both mp and stills have common ground in Muybridge, I would say....

 

* In Ozu's later films, the continuity of balances trumps screen direction (which ignores the "180" rule etc)

 

Not trying to be contrary, I just think there are interesting points of intersection between the two practices, as well as the obvious differences...

 

-Sam

[Satsuki Murashige]

Well, consider the effect of each form on its intended audience. What expectations does each fulfill? Both are recordings of past events; one appeals to the conscious mind, the other to the subconscious.

 

A photograph exists only in the past - in effect, a photograph stops time and forces us to contemplate an image of something (morning light in September of 1962, your mother when she was a child, etc.) that no longer exists. As viewers, we experience an ironic distance from the subject which moves us.

 

A film exists both in the past and in the present - a child chases (note the present tense!) after a ball into the middle of a busy street and we cringe in anticipation, even on the twelfth viewing. We are moved by the illusion of reality. Some filmmakers attempt to break this illusion and create the ironic distance that photography takes for granted; then we are aware that what we are watching is not life at all, but merely a crude imitation.

 

If a film does convince the subconscious mind of its reality, then it is almost inevitably narrative, because the camera by its nature captures a series of events, and the editor by default structures those events into a sequence. Even if a film is constituted entirely of still photographs, those images must appear for a definite length of time on screen, then to be succeeded by another image, and another, ad nauseum. So cinema is not necessarily cinematography, but cinematography is necessarily cinema.

 

I guess if you wanted to make the analogy, photography is to cinema as memories are to dreams. And Godard's films are lucid dreams!

 

*EDIT: Okay, that made no sense at all, but it's late - give me a break!

Edited November 19, 2006 by Satsuki Murashige

[Keith Mottram]

Each shot is composed with the awareness that it will have to 'cut' into another shot fluidly.

 

It is? I've beed editing for half my life and in my experience etc etc....

[Hal Smith]

Perception of Depth. A dolly sideways or a boom up or down will say more about the three dimensional structure of a scene than fiddling for hours with composition and lighting will in still photography.

[Sam Wells]

It is? I've beed editing for half my life and in my experience etc etc....

 

 

:D

 

-Sam

[Francis Kuhn]

A film exists both in the past and in the present - a child chases (note the present tense!) after a ball into the middle of a busy street and we cringe in anticipation, even on the twelfth viewing.

 

Hi Satsuki,

 

Interestingly, Eddie Adams' Pulitzer Prize-winning 1968 photograph of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon always makes me feel the same anxiety every time I see it.

[Satsuki Murashige]

Interestingly, Eddie Adams' Pulitzer Prize-winning 1968 photograph of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon always makes me feel the same anxiety every time I see it.

That's a good point, though I would argue that as the viewer studies the picture, he or she becomes aware that the event it depicts is already history. The man died a second after the photo was taken; there's nothing the viewer can do now to save him. Instead, our gaze lingers on the face of the (soon to be, already?) dead man, noting his battered face, his disheveled hair, his wincing anticipation of the bullet entering his brain. Then we look at General Loan, and examine the small hand gripping the tiny pistol, the wiry muscles of his outstretched arm, the rolled sleeves of his clean uniform, his expressionless face. We feel pity for the prisoner, and horror at what war has revealed about human nature - that we are capable of killing each other without feeling much of anything. That's the story the picture tells.

 

Watching the 16mm newsreel footage of the execution, I'm struck at how quickly it all happened. The filmed event seems at once more real and less meaningful than the photograph. I guess that's the tyranny of cinema, that we're forced to experience events in the flow of time, rather than outside of it. (I still dig cinema though!) :)

[Delorme Jean-Marie]

hi

i'd say that the goal is the same : give an emotion, one need a fraction of second to achieve it when the other need one hour and a half plus a bucket of popcorn! :)

 

somehow cinematographers are jalous of photographers

[Sam Wells]

Jean-Marie: I _am_ in fact "jealous" (wrong word, but...) of still photographers... not so much the economy ('truth in a fraction of a second") as in fact the decoupling of the shutter, the liberal choices of the shutter speed.... (the range of materials to view the work ON, too..)

 

Satsuki: My work in film/digital currently addresses this 'tyranny of cinema' - in fact why I'm transferring film to HD, to contest what the linear timeline means... but it's too much in progress to say more now.

 

-Sam

[Jason Maeda]

i've seen few good photographers make good filmmakers, and the opposite is even more true.

 

usually, and i'm pretty much writing this without thinking about it too much ;), photographers start rolling and can't sit still...they're zooming and moving and all of it for no good reason. dp's grab a still camera and just take a boring ass picture with no story, no "definitive moment".

 

jk :ph34r:

[Dominic Case]

The photographer and the cinematographer were arguing about whose craft was the better.

 

"My pictures move" said the cinematographer.

 

"Mine don't have to" replied the photographer.

 

. . . . .but really it is all about what you signify with the image(s) you record.

 

In a still photograph, you have to "read" the image and use your imagination to work out what happened a second (or a year or a lifetime) before the shot was taken, and what will happen next.

 

In a moving picture, you can at least see the immediate past and future of any given instant of time - but only as much as the filmmaker shows you. And there is still room for imagination and "reading" of the image to figure out what is happening outside the frame.

[Dino Giammattei]

Barn doors.

I was recently asked to do some still photography for a corporate client. Having not done any still work on a professional level in several decades, I was rather intimidated by the thought of having to reacquaint myself with the whole electronic flash thing. It made me realize that there's another big difference between still and motion pictures. Lighting techniques and equipment for stills is incredibly primitive compared to what we have in motion media. Everything is about big old softlights that blow out the background and make any real control difficult to achieve. It takes so much putzing around to get an electronic flash to be civilized. Measuring ambient light against the flash. Trying to finesse a pleasant looking picture from the harsh blast of a flash has been a real challenge. The thing I miss the most might be barn doors. It had never occurred to me that I take these little guys for granted. I will have to flag the dickens out of this setup to even get close to what I can do with a few fresnels. Yikes.

 

dino g

[Hal Smith]

..........flag the dickens out of this setup to even get close to what I can do with a few fresnels. Yikes.

And the reason you can't use an 80A and fresnels is? Other than losing 1-1/3 stop?

[Dino Giammattei]

In short? seafood display + hot quartz lighting x several hours = well done sushi.

 

Quartz or HMI lighting was actually the plan at first. I came to the conclusion that for most of the shots, I would really need more depth of focus than I was going to get using anything but some serious lighting. The thought of ruining 70K worth of product scared the heck out of me. Besides, I grew up on the northeast Atlantic coast and can't stand the smell of rotting fish.

 

dino

[Elliot Loewenstein]

A photograph can be wonderful, beautiful, arresting, etc. But it can never touch the magnificence of a masterful painting. Cinematography (forgetting museum-quality crap) is one of the more significant elements of the highest medium of the modern age. As a singular medium, however, all bow down to music.

 

All of the above in a purely artistic sense. A photograph gains prominence when it enters the consciousness of the masses. Emmett Till, for example, and history is stamped and shaped by an image.

[Daniel Sheehy]

A photograph exists only in the past... ...A film exists both in the past and in the present...

Not sure I entirely agree with your idea that film somehow exists in the present... I feel they are both equally restricted to the past, the difference is in the manner in which they involve the audience.

 

As a person who works with both motion and still pictures, I have to disagree with the generalisation that Jason made regarding photographers and dp's. :)

 

They are different mediums. Different ways of telling stories. They can complement each other, and yet stand alone. As such I really don't see any way to compare them. They rely on similar technologies and ideas about lighting, framing and composition but they have different goals.

 

You might as well argue the distinction between painting and cinematography.