Alexandros Angelopoulos Apostolos

The camera for this scene from the film was placed at a 90° angle to the left from the viewpoint of the camera that took this picture. That means that it was placed opposite the ivy-covered wall, or opposite Alec Baldwin’s face if he were looking straight and not towards Jesse Eisenberg. However, in the film, I don’t think that there’s shadow on Alec’s face, not even a tiny bit. I’d have to check. But another thing I was wondering is could his black jacket be intentionally black and could it have served as some sort of negative fill, albeit very minor, probably? :) Then there’s that Roman woman in the Piazza del Popolo scene, also wearing black, but I don’t think her clothes were acting as negative fill. I was really interested in finding backstage photos of the production with negative fill since Darius said in the interview for the American Cinematographer he used it a lot. Thank you, Miguel Ángel.

True, but I never thought they were interested in lighting in that way. More like interested in electrons and currents. :) I mean, it makes total sense; I just never thought they were interested in the artistic side of lighting.

You won’t? :blink:

Don’t you need to pass some entrance exams to enter a film school? And not just walk in there like that?

This is the first time I hear of that career path, Adrian. :blink: Electrician to DP? Really?

Is this negative fill? I think it’s the only instance of it I managed to find online. And Darius says he used it a lot in Rome.

What do you guys think is emitting this lovely golden light?

Who would’ve said! Looks very natural. B) It’s also cute, the actors’ faces make me smile.

Got it. :) Thank you. Satsuki, that third image from the high-key comedy looks like a still for a magazine ad. :)

Kees Van Oostrum replaces Richard Crudo: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/american-society-cinematographers-names-kees-902513 Bill Bennett, Dean Cundey and Lowell Peterson will be VPs.

I got it from here (I thought it’d be difficult to find the exact post) – so it wasn’t A Very Long Engagement, but Amélie: I don’t have a problem with it (if he asked for a higher fee). I don’t think it’s greed. He is top notch, that’s just it. I love a certain firmness of this kind (though I don’t know how I’d feel if I were a producer bankrolling this): my services cost this much, and that’s the deal. You want a Khondji light, it costs that much. And, Stuart, I actually love it when there’s flow in crews. It is annoying when a director glues himself onto his DP. Case in point: Kamiński and Spielberg or Robert Richardson and Tarantino or Scorsese or any other, probably better, examples. Darius Khondji, too, seems to work with various people, although some do reapper, e.g. for films shot in France Cyril Kuhnholz, he worked with Frans Wetterings several times, he also seems to like when Pascal Dangin does the colour correction and so on. It seems to be his preferred format: everywhere you look, he talks about anamorphic, how much he loves it, and how it’s appropriate for the film being discussed. I love it that you mentioned Chéri; I was waiting to hear something about his work on it. Funny how his preferences changed over the years: when he was talking about Midnight in Paris and To Rome with Love, he spoke of Frost and Rollux as his favourite types of diffusion. In an article about Chéri, he was saying how tracing paper is his preferred material, but that gaffers don’t like to use it because it’s very flammable. I’d have to check, but for Irrational Man, I think it was unbleached muslin? Or perhaps I misunderstood everything and he was talking about preferred diffusion for that particular film he was being interviewed about. Okja will be shot in Vancouver from 31st July to 21st August so I’m hoping for some behind-the-scenes, though I’m not holding my breath given the scarceness of photos from the filming of The Lost City of Z and others. On the other hand, Okja has some big talent so who knows? That filming schedule might mean that he won’t be available for Woody Allen’s New York drama this summer, but then again, maybe Woody has already chose someone else or the filming won’t be in the summer, a time of the year it usually happens.

Clarification? :)

Thank you. :) Here’s another very fundamental thing I’d like to know: what is the equivalent of shutter speed in a movie camera? If it’s film, what is the exposure time of a frame? And what happens with digital? Is the frame exposure time constant, equal to 1/24 of a second?

:) Memo to myself: “Alexa” does not mean “Alexa 65”.

Did you see it while at ENS? There’ll be something else in 5-year time, some new Alexa. :)

Two questions: is that VariCon thing something people are taught in film school during a cinematography (under)graduate course? And two, so tracking through a piece of space with varying degrees of illumination doesn’t really matter because the aperture stays the same? For example, if you step from a fairly faint interior through the door into harsh midday Sun?

Has he also split with Jean-Pierre Jeunet? But perhaps that wasn’t a feud; Khondji just asked for a fee Jeunet couldn’t afford, which is why Jeunet went with Delbonnel for A Very Long Engagement. Is that how it went?

This reminded me of something… I often read about how an entire film was shot at one aperture or how there were maybe three aperture values for the whole film or something. So I’d like to know is that how it’s done: you pick an aperture and then you go on to set up the lights so that with that aperture value you will have the desired exposure? It somehow seems it should be the reverse, but there’s surely a reason for this. And second question: what happens with the camera’s aperture when there’s a tracking shot following a person through varying degrees of illumination?

That’s all I’m getting? :) All this talk of brilliance makes my heart rejoice. He really is brilliant. He’s my favourite. That’s it. I love his photography. There’s this irresistible tastefulness about his work, this impeccable French taste, and none of it just magazine photoshoot prettiness. It’s much more and much better than that. Perhaps his approach hasn’t changed; it’s just that the most recent films he has worked on aren’t of that type as the ones at the beginning of his career. I, too, cannot wait for both The Lost City of Z and Okja. His work is so diverse, and I am sorry that he hasn’t worked as much as I think he should have. When he said that he is not an award-winner, he won me even more. It seems to matter little to him; his work speaks volumes. Not winning an award is immaterial.

Yeah, I forgot an important thing I’ve read just recently: “goes all out on his grades”. I just couldn’t believe I didn’t come to that conclusion before I read that, because it’s really true, if you take a look at his recent work.

So what about Darius Khondji? Quite a few times I went through the threads about his work around here, and it’s mostly about Seven, a tiny bit of My Blueberry Nights, a nice remark about how The Interpreter was “shot surprisingly straight” (Phil Rhodes), some were interested in the VariCon and negative flashing process, one thread about Delicatessen, a film which probably was the first real breakthrough, but all in all, not really much about him. I was just thinking the other day about how he likes to used bounced or reflected light or bounced and reflected, which some say here is what he exclusively use, and how in those Woody Allen films, no matter how gorgeous I find them, ended looking like a little bit too much diffusion. So what is his reputation? I dread asking this, but I have to: is he one of the top-notch cinematographers working today or perhaps just a tiny, tiny bit down the ladder? I’d say he is top-notch. He himself says that he’s (just) not an award-winner. I couldn’t really find much about some of his preferences, apart from perhaps a lot of diffusion and lots of bounce, loves anamorphic, seems not to have anything against digital (perhaps one of the first who shot with the Alexa for a commercial)… Not really much. What are your thoughts on his work?

My impression is that it all looked like a fun presentation for the kids in a kindergarten. And I don’t mean that in a bad way; it was cute but insubstantial. I also gasped a bit how much of it was catchup, from Siri for macOS (Cortana has been on Windows for how long now?) to rich links in iMessage, for example, and how awfully dated iOS looks. It looks terrible. So I wanted to know your impressions to see if I missed anything that’s really relevant but that I thought was irrelevant, fluff, and catch-up. :)

Wow, I have a lot of homework to do... The more I delve into his work, the more the pile of stuff to be seen or investigated grows. To bad that a lot of the things he photographed aren’t my kind of thing. Thus my cluelessness. I just thought it was hip and trendy to like him, especially in the crowd of filmmakers and people involved in film-making that are tech-savvy, but that the knowledgeable public did not share that same flattering opinion of Roger. P. S. I have no idea how this thread ended with this baffling title, which should’ve, obviously, been “What’s the deal with Roger Deakins?” Wow. :blink: I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Ha! I thought that was a must! Something like the opposite of double shadows: you just have to have lots of light going through windows! But look at that… :)

Any announcement from this year’s WWDC that you liked? :) Or did the conference perhaps disappoint you?

Tyler, do you think that in the future, and perhaps not a too distant one, they will develop a 20K camera that will have such processing as to make its imagery as good as or perhaps better than today’s film?