Nic MacDonald

If you're able to get enough exposure under the canopies with the stock the director's bought, I'm not sure I see the issue. An F4 will give you plenty of depth of field on a small format like Super 16, surely enough for landscape shots where there's nothing close to the lens. Is there something I'm missing?

Actually, in the November 2011 edition of American Cinematographer, the cinematographer on Martha Marcy May Marlene talks about how the filmmakers made a decision to underexpose all the negative by two stops to give the film a 'worn' feeling. Naturally, this kind of technique shows up more in some circumstances than others. Sometimes technical perfection isn't the goal.

Our entire system of perception is based on contrast. The blacks are the foundation of an image in that everything else plays against them. Red looks redder when there are deep blacks in frame, because our eyes have a reference for not-red. Make sense? Images with weak blacks tend to look more washed out. Some cinematographers like and use this effect. For example, take Harris Savides, who has been known to use low-contrast film stocks which he then underexposes, sometimes also using older lenses with more veiling glare. Depending on the colours in the respective scene, the blacks in these films (e.g. Birth and American Gangster) tended to take on a lighter, dark greyish or brownish tone, which I would say is more naturalistic than the solid blacks that technical perfection demands. In life, it's quite rare to see a pure black. Obviously, the nature of the film suggests the cinematographer's approach to the blacks, as with every other aspect of the images, and people have different ideas as to what constitutes naturalism even if that's the approach the film seems to want. And there's no right answer. Whatever you think looks better, is better, as long as it's right for the film.

Many thanks to both of you.

A train of thought involving the film Ransom lead me to think about the cinematography. I haven't watched this film in nearly ten years, but I recall that it begins and ends in black and white, with the colour fading in at the beginning and out at the end. The film was released in 1996, pre-DI. How would they have achieved the transitions between black and white and colour? I'm sure there's a simple answer, but I'm not aware of a photochemical way to do this. The only way I can think of that might work would be to strike both colour and black and white IPs and do a dissolve between them, which would have been a special effect at the time. Any ideas?