David Mawson

100iso means the film needs a lot of light. A Bout de Souffle was shot at 800 iso. I think the interiors were shot without film lights but they were very carefully chosen. I'd have to pop ISO up to at least 1600 to shoot in most of my house on a typical day. Without any meaning to give offense, if you have't yet got a feel for ISO then you are much better off shooting with digital until you develop that feel. Borrow or buy a cheap mirrorless like a GX80 - you'll see the light as it will be recorded and you can review your work instantly. Once you've used it for a few weeks, then go back to film if you feel it is right for your project.

I'm looking for examples of films shot in genuine and typical houses and apartments, rather than sets made to look like them. And for suggestions or guides as to how to do this. So far the films to look at seem to be Godard's and Ken Loach's, but I'd appreciate other examples. Loach shoots in glances from quite long lenses, but this produces a claustrophobic feel and it isn't what I'm after, so it looks l need to do the unimaginative thing and use a wide angle, but I'd still like to do more research...

Follow-up for anyone finding this thread via the site search or google: So far I've experimented with a single 100W "daylight" CFL sold for photographic use: - Light colour seems reasonably good (but my standards are probably low) and the power is enough to even out the dimmer parts of an unevenly lit small room (15 by 20ft?) in daylight, which is the most I hoped for from 100W. It's definitely several times more powerful than 100w of incandescent. - The bulb is too big for cheap dish type reflectors and parcans - it's about the size and shape of a 75cl water bottle, which means bouncing the way I planned is out. - So I I either use it as fill for a whole (small!) room letting it shine evenly in all directions or with a reflector behind it. In either role I should really add a diffuser to protect the performers's eyes. The bulb does not seem to get hot - I wouldn't worry about putting several between a reflector and a diffuser as long as there was a bit of an air gap, but obviously, use common sense. The most attractive points for me seem to be that CFL is cheap, reasonable quality, simple - you just put a bulb in a very normal socket, no ballast or cooling - safe, and that it will be easy to build a versatile system. Holders cost less than a couple of coffee and the light can be shaped with paper and card, so 3 bulbs could be used together or separately as needed. The downside is probably that CMH has better colour and is easier to put into powerful compact parcan type units. And that CFL bulbs need some care handling. Overall I'd rate them - so far! - as low barrier to entry system that produces tolerable results for people who need to light small areas where they'll have access to main power. In my case, good enough to take the pressure off while I work on halides.

Maybe at 76 he just doesn't want to shoot a film every year, and he avoids the higher stress projects because he wants to see 77?

And Triumph Of The Will is astoundingly well shot - it pre-dates and influences Caine.

Either should be fine. Indeed, I'd expect them to be overkill. But you don't give the details people really need to help you. The important things are the distance between the camera and the table and the dimensions of the area you want to shoot - that will give focal length. You also need the room to be well-lit - soft light from all sides will minimise shadows and let you use a decent depth of field - obviously you'll be shooting with focus pre-set. Really, I'd expect the cheap but excellent 12-32 kit lens would do a great job. Or a decent phone. In the unlikely event that you need a wider field of view than these can provide then neither of the lenses you mention will help - you'd need the 8-18 zoom, or maybe a wide prime lens.

You might find the advice in this thread useful - https://www.photo.net/discuss/threads/tripod-recommendation-for-4x5.450169/ ...Tripods made for monorails are really sturdy beasts and you can often pick them up cheaply.

That limit was set entirely by the technical capability of the time. You do get that consumer electronics were rather less advanced in 1941 and there was no possibility of creating a fibre optic network, so video had to be transmitted using radio, on a rather narrow band of frequencies, using analog technology? Even if it had been possible to build a 4K colour TV, the bandwidth available would have sufficed, at best, for a single channel...

Have you thought of using polymorph aka instamorph? You buy grains of nylon in a jar, dunk them in hot water, and they become moldable. If it's not strong enough by itself you can sometimes use it as an outer layer over a steel or aluminium core. It works especially well if you have a bolt-on solution that would fit but said bolt is a bit too small - you pack the socket with a still flexible wad of nylon, screw the bolt into it, and when it's cooled you have created an adapter.

The google results on this subject are very strange... I'm grabbing a 100W CFL for a tenner. It's supposedly equivalent to a 500W incandescent and I'm guessing maybe to a 75-100W CMH in both light and heat output. (The second is important because it will be a constraint on modifier design.) I'll use it, and maybe a couple more like it, to prototype my light set-up and then hunt for CMHs when I know more about what will work for my lighting look. Thanks again!

Now I've done that image search and know what I'm looking for, yes, the difference is clear. I found this link on diy CMH systems - http://www.personal.psu.edu/sbj4/aquarium/mh/mhlighting.html This part seems a little worrying One problem with the electronic ballasts is that they often have to be tuned to the specific bulb or classes of lamps. This may be a problem if you want to change from say a US made lamp to a German or Japanese lamp, since it requires sending the ballast back to the manufacturer for re-tuning. This also looked useful - http://www.kindgreenbuds.com/marijuana-grow-guide/build-your-own-hps-or-mh-light-system/ I hadn't realised While all HPS bulbs can burn in any position, a MH bulb must be purchased specific to the mounting position you intend to use. There are MH bulbs made specifically for horizontal placement, base-up placement, vertical (base down) placement and also universal placement. The universal type bulbs can burn in any position, but are not quite as bright (maybe 5% less) as the position specific bulbs. I think I'll treat CMH as a project and start with CFLs to find out how much light I want and how I want it deployed - I can just grab CFLs and holders cheaply and plug them together with no hassles. If the results aren't great colour-wise, I'll turn them to b&w. I'll carry on researching and ebay stalking CMH, then when I have a better definition of what I want and a feel for the hardware, I can switch.

They have an absolutely excellent rep in the stills world for what they are for - AF lenses with secondary focus by wire.They don't work well for a lot of video purposes because focus pulls aren't repeatable, but they are excellent optically. Some are better than that - the 20mm is widely considered a classic. Some Oly Pro m43 lenses do have repeatable focus - the 12-40 is one, I think.

Exactly. The diagrams and explanations here might help people understand why- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbra,_penumbra_and_antumbra ..If you look at the eclipse diagram and imagine the sun shrinking to a point then its obvious that the penumbra - the region of soft shadow - will vanish.

That was me. And for professional use you can't afford to judge reliability that way unless an asset is one you can afford to replace if a fault develops. For vital assets you really need something like this http://cpn.canon-europe.com/content/services.do Welcome to Canon Professional Services (CPS). The European CPS programme is a completely free service that offers Canon professional photo and video users exclusive access to a range of benefits. These include access to CPS support at major events; a priority repair service; and local CPS support in selected European countries. Free back-up equipment loans during repair periods are also available, depending on the level of your CPS membership Although your son's camera did fine, Sony are known for horror stories like Phil Peterson's here - https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0158SRJVQ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewpnt_rgt?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&filterByStar=critical&pageNumber=1 ..That isn't saying that you shouldn't buy Sony (I'm waiting to see what the next A7 series is like myself) just that when you buy a business critical asset for any business, you have to make reliability and service a much bigger part of the picture than for a consumer purchase - paying 10 or 20% more for robustness, fast repairs and loaners can make excellent sense. Alternatively, keep an emergency fund that lets you replace a piece of equipment while it is being repair, either by buying or renting. ...And it seems that Sony are at least offering paid-for pro support now - https://alphauniverse.com/prosupport/ ...Although you need to have bought quite a lot of hardware to qualify - and then they might still turn you down.

I'm guessing that iron ballasts are cheaper and I should assume that they are the default, especially with work and security lights? This seems to be the biggest problem in buying on ebay - very few people say what type a ballast is. You posted pictures, but to be honest the iron and electronic both look the same - except one is white and one is black, which I doubt is a reliable guide... I did find a great page on ballasts though - http://hid.venturelighting.com/TechCenter/BallastTypes.html ..Actually, that link seems to say that electronic is now the default, except for very high voltages...

I think that covers everything - again, thanks. The other option I've seen - that you've probably discarded as inferior for good reason, but which I thought I'd mention in case it interests you - are high CRI CFLs. Photosel seem to be the main high CRI brand in the UK and they claim one of their 100W bulbs will replace 500w of incandescent. (The CFL bulbs are monsters though - physically huge.) ..I tried to research the pros and cons of the two technologies with google, put I just got pages of results on pot growing.

Thanks, Phil - buying used isn't an option I thought of, but I can see that store lighting will be designed for a huge life. One final question: do heads like https://www.lyco.co.uk/theta-metal-halide-display-light-150w-silver.html have built-in ballast, what with being CMH specific?

Most people wouldn't interpret low contrast as friendly, just as low contrast. If high contrast was unfriendly, then the average childrens' cartoon would be terrifying... The best animation house in the world, Trigger, went for a lower contrast look on Kill La Kill, which was definitely their grittiest production, and animation houses are masters of colour schemes. And warm is a surely a product of lighting and post - and white balance - rather than the lens. From the samples I've seen, Cooke makes skin look good and they have an exceptionally pleasant focus fall off - so much so that when I was still concentrating on stills I looked up their prices. (Which was an interesting experience, I can tell you..) I don't know if a "civilian" would really see anything retro about that look. And I'm even less sure that retro conflicts with gritty. As a look gritty could be low or high contrast - gritty is a property of a look, not a look in itself.

I'm new to video but I've been shooting stills for a while... And I don't think there is such a thing as a "rough and gritty lens", except one that needs sending in for repair. There just isn't an official lens of Gangsta.

My video shooting skills are such that I can't usefully say anything except that it looks like something I'd expect to see on TV. I especially liked what the mellow but sinister tonality - very much the colour scheme of depression. Have you thought of adding some sort of linking device between the start and the end? Eg the actor could look at a photograph of himself and a woman in the first few frames, the photo being taken on the island. That creates suspense - what's the significance of the image? And meaning - the journey becomes a sort of pilgrimage in time and hopefully people get the idea that something important is happening. The photograph can fall to the floor after the shot is fired. Or you could cut to the photograph, which he was looking at, and then the shot would be heard and you'd hear the body hit the floor. (The phone doesn't work for this purpose because, well, a shot of a guy using his phone and then driving is just a shot of a guy doing unremarkable things - the first time I watched it I didn't even remember that the guy had used his phone earlier at the end. I think narrative props and ties between sequences have to stand out as significant when the audience sees them, so that they'll be remembered. I only know the phone is there now because I gave the video a final view before posting and this time, when the phone appeared, I remembered it later because I wondered if it might be serving that role.)

And I was planning on clusters of these https://www.everything-led.co.uk/item-p-ilgu10ne078/7-watt-4000k-real-colour-gu10-%3Ecri-95-50w/ ..3 to a stand, probably using 2 stands plus daylight to light an average size domestic room. These look interesting but cost more https://cocolighting.com/buy-soraa-led-lighting/soraa-mr16-gu10-vivid-95-cri/ http://luxreview.com/review/2015/02/reviewed-soraa-vivid-led-mr16-3000k I think I need to think some more about how much light I need. This link looks promising - http://wolfcrow.com/blog/how-to-put-together-a-lighting-kit-for-video-part-one-q/ ..I think I feel a headache coming on. Possibly combined with the desire to buy an f0.95 lens...

I'm seeing "Here is how to grow lots of marijuana!!!" articles. Or maybe growing tomatoes in cellars is a more popular hobby than I thought...

Then my big advice - GET BUSINESS INSURANCE! I'd shoot for free rather than charge without it, and I'm in the much less litigious UK. And second to that, don't think of this as quitting school - she should take part time courses, either by distance learning or attending a local school. Put some serious effort into finding the best value courses available that will help a small business owner. Also, consider reliability and service carefully when making major investments in hardware - eg Sony have a very poor rep for both compared to Nikon and Canon in stills world.

I had no idea there were such things as 100W LEDs - the most powerful I could find were 20W! I've been sloppy and should have given more details. I was going to put one LED in a small ebay parcam and then make a fitting to let me attach 3 or 4 to a table tripod, put the thing on the floor, and bounce. I'd deal with any heat problems by increasing the distance between the very small cans. The idea of keeping them low was (is?) so they can be shot over and hidden behind furniture. The CMH bulbs seem like a good idea - although given the links returned by the search I just did, I'd worry that I was going to end up on "person of interest" lists kept by the police... Btw - what does "hot start" mean? Or can you recommend a link explaining terminology? And thanks again to everyone responding - my OP really isn't well-phrased, I don't know nearly enough about the basic issues - I did do web searches but the info I found really wasn't great.

That was one of my main fears, but coming from a stills background I didn't have the terminology - thanks, that's very useful! ...The spikes shouldn't matter if I shoot in b&w? (I'd rather have the option of colour, but I'm willing to shoot mono if it lets me get experience with less cost and weight and quicker light set-ups.) I should add that I'm in the UK, re. vendors. Otoh, $300 for one light is more than I want to pay at this stage.