Phil Rhodes

I regret the need to continue this rather sordid discussion any further than has already been continued, but this subject deserves clearer thinking than this. Gay people in America (at least, in New York) can already get married. This is not about some grand moral crusade. This is about wedding photos. I'm not saying don't enforce the law; enforce it, as a matter of general principle. This photographer sounds massively unpleasant, and far from the bastion of kindness and forgiveness religions often claim to push for. Still, let's not pretend this makes any very large difference to the grand scheme of things. It also, as Matthew says, is not, or certainly should not, be about generalising about which group is worst-off. Based on the results of this court case it's hard to claim that anyone, beyond this photographer, is supporting the marginalisation of anyone else. The state appears to have acted entirely properly and precisely as any reasonable lawyer would have expected it to; this is no evidence of a grand conspiracy against gay people or anyone else. Quite the opposite. If this was an attempt to bully anyone it failed spectacularly. These things vary internationally, but considering how poorly young white working-class boys, most of whom are either not gay or will turn out not to be gay, do in some parts of the world, it's clear that basing our thinking on what we might call traditional victim groups is no longer adequate - as if group membership should affect anyone's right to anything anyway. I would point out also that the case in question was actually brought by the photographer against the jurisdiction in order to avoid being fined, not any potential client of the photographer against her. P

That's sort of the point; I suspect it won't actually have that effect. The problem is fairly easy to understand if you posit whacking someone over the head with a club in the hope they'll wake up agreeing with you. I incline toward Karim's approach on this. You can't make people like you and you can't legislate opinion, and I think there are a lot of situations where that makes it worse. Unfortunately the assumption that this stuff is simple is a large part of why it's so hard to solve.

The problem there is if one has already accepted a job before finding something out about it that one does not like, which I suspect is something we've all hit, albeit in very different circumstances. Perhaps one could retroactively make some sort of excuse; depends on the circumstances. From the other perspective, I can't say that I would have bothered to bring a court case about it. We've had several people turn up to this very forum looking to hire people based on their gender, which is illegal in a large majority of the places both the poster and anyone reading the post are likely to be. I can't say it ever occurred to me to instruct a solicitor, for the very good reason that doing so is not likely to change anyone's views and quite likely to entrench them. It's also a spectacular waste of the court's and my time and money under circumstances where what's really happened is that someone's been impolite to someone else - someone I've now no interest in dealing with anyway.

My view on this is that I wouldn't necessarily want someone with those opinions photographing my wedding anyway. I think the main issue here is that we'd prefer it if everyone was nice and tolerant to one another. Unfortunately you can't make someone tolerant by forcing them to do things they don't want to do - quite the opposite, probably. As such I find myself torn between the idea that people shouldn't be free to arbitrarily disadvantage people, and the equally valid and powerful reality that the result here probably doesn't really change anyone's view or meaningfully alter the situation long term. I have no idea what the right solution is, other than that religion in general is a bad idea that doesn't help anyone. In most first-world countries, people in general are becoming less religious, and that can only be a good thing. P

For what it's worth, Matthew, I feel much the same way about some of the huge deserts of the American southwest, which I never get to shoot. There are so many shades of greener grass.

Jeez, that looks like something out of The Lighthouse. Paging @Jarin Blaschke!

I should have said, it's very nice stuff. I remember (in about 2001) when I bought my first real camera and took it out to a local country park, it was a morning like that.

I was complaining that the entire world round here looks like this...

As you allude to here, the concept of these things having a native ISO in this context is fairly arbitrary. All modern sensors have amplifiers on them which take the (minute) currents actually created by the converted photons and inflate them to a level that's comprehensible to an analogue-to-digital converter. The behaviour of all that creates what looks like a native ISO, but really, it's just a matter of the engineer's opinion as to what a reasonable level of noise looks like. It is quite possible to specify the absolute noisefloor of an imaging sensor and the engineer's reference materials from them often do so. Usually it's a single digit number of electrons in a competitive modern cinema sensor with a full well capacity of tens of thousands. Often there's no such number given for a finished camera. It was once common to do this for broadcast cameras but it isn't a widely discussed or understood specification now. I'm not sure why, though given many modern cameras are very heavily reliant on digital noise reduction it might not have much meaning. Phil

My opinion means nothing because I'm not really a cameraman of any kind, let alone a director of photography, but I'll happily take a well specified super-35mm sensor over any of the bigger stuff because, in my view, the microscopically slight differences (I hesitate even to say improvement) are so trivial as to be massively outweighed by the inconveniences on almost all productions. If you're perpetually working on stuff where your resources are effectively infinite, fine, but even then I think it's really just the tsar putting gold on his bread.

Bah, humbug!

Whatever the conclusion is, I think that image is a particularly wonderful example of the complexity of human skin tones. It makes me wonder if that rosy blush in her cheeks is for real, or just the most subtle and carefully-done makeup.

A non-fungible token is intended to be a unique and non-alterable record of who owns something. It uses the same underlying technology (a blockchain) as a cryptocurrency such as bitcoin or ethereum. This is less complicated than it sounds. The idea is that each record in a chain has a serial number which is based, in part, on the serial number and content of the record before it. Thus, any change to a record in any given chain would change the serial numbers of all subsequent records, making it effectively impossible to retroactively alter a record without the tampering being obvious to everyone. It's not bad technology; it's pretty secure. If there's a problem it's that verifying the integrity of any particular record can require significant computer resources, since every record in the chain must be examined to verify that its serial number and content properly reflects the serial numbers and content of the records preceding it. This has quite a large carbon footprint and has been criticised on that basis. Phil

Given that nobody here personally knows any of the people involved, my understanding is that Van Diemen have done some maintenance work Adnan is not happy with, or at least that's the core of the dispute. Given that nobody here has any specific information on the state of the lenses before or after the work was done, what was promised, or what was expected, it's very difficult for anyone to comment meaningfully. I have no opinion either way, but many people will be aware that Van Diemen has not survived very nearly forty years in the business by misbehaving, so there will certainly be two sides to this. Phil

Yes. Simply specifying "300dpi," which is what's commonly specified, is completely meaningless. One could provide an early-90s computer screen grab 300 pixels across and accurately claim it's 300dpi if you print it an inch wide. It's more reasonable if you assume "300dpi at a reasonable size" but without knowing what the page layout will be, there's a lot of wiggle room in "reasonable." Many people who work in publishing have been told to ask for "300dpi" with very little understanding of what it means. Generally my working policy is that images supplied for print should be several thousands of pixels across and that seems to work out OK. And that's for photos. If we're doing text and graphics and we want text to look really good, especially when it will be printed on a good inkjet or commercial offset printer, 600 to 1200dpi is a better target. Magazine pages are generally output at that sort of resolution to keep the body text looking crisp. In these days of 12-plus-megapixel digital cinema cameras outputting images 8K across and more, the resolution gap between moving, still and printed images is starting to close in any case. P

Yup.

I don't have anything to sell you, but you may also wish to consider UPRTek. I have a CV600 and it's very useful.

- least-expensive movies - economically-produced shows - thriftily-budgeted productions - competitively-priced films - modestly-expensive shoots - cautiously-financed cinematography And my personal favourite: - Media which shambles forth unsteadily from the stygian depths of the bargain basement with a guttural croak of "filmzzzz." I post this as a sort of desperate thesaurus, in the hope that it will be useful to people forced into discussions in which it becomes necessary to refer kindly to the poorly-funded nature of a production.

That article is very interesting, although I feel the need to be clear that my objection to Dune wasn't the dialogue mix; it didn't have the Tenet problem in that sense. Both of them - and Dunkirk, characteristically - were just way, way, way too loud, to the point of being really quite painful. That's a separate (if perhaps related) issue to the problems with dialogue mixing.

I suspect that even if they had, the results would not become public until after any associated legal action was complete - which could take months or years.

90Ah batteries? They must be big block batteries that sit on the dolly; not something you can throw on a V-mount. Very few things you can put on a V-mount will run a 600W load for 11 hours.

In general I agree with what's being said here. There is one thing I think is worth a closer look, though. Assuming this really is from the actors' union's own paperwork, SAG/AFTRA is quoting standard gun safety procedures. These procedures are reasonable and essential in the context of normal firearms handling. However, in the very unique circumstances of filmmaking, it is patently obvious that actors will sometimes be required to point weapons at other people, perhaps deliberately as in the case of a scene where one actor appears to shoot at another, or, very commonly, toward camera or other parts of the environment where there will be people. This is the unique risk of a film set; people are often required to break some of the most cardinal, fundamental, inviolable rules of firearms handling. This is why there are special procedures, and this is why so much caution is required. As such, what we have here is a major organisation blindly parroting procedures which are at least sometimes impossible to follow. This does not help the cause of risk management, provokes the normalisation of deviance, and risks putting safety culture in a bad light. P

It depends to an extent how your camera allows you to set the frame rate. If you need to set it in terms of an absolute number of frames per second, then if you set something that's a multiple of the project frame rate (25 in your case) then when you play it back, all of your step printed frames will be the same duration so it will look more consistent. I assume you've realised that and that this is why you're asking the question. If you can only set integer frame rates then that does limit you somewhat on 25fps projects because the only things that divide into 25 are 5 and 10. Naturally if you can set twelve and a half or eight and a third, so be it, but not a lot of cameras give you that. 24-frame projects can have 2, 3, 4, 6 or 12. The other thing is that if you are particularly keen to shoot a specific step-printed rate, if you're not relying on sync sound, then you can probably just shoot something close to what your output rate will be and just live with the fact that it won't play back at exactly the rate it was shot. I'd go higher (9 or 13 rather than 8 or 12) so it's slightly slowed down as opposed to slightly sped up; sped up is often more noticeable. Or, you can live with the fact that it won't be played back at an entirely consistent rate, that is, all your step printed frames won't all be exactly the same number of output frames. P