Leon Brehony

Thanks for all the tips! I ended up making some makeshift mazes. It comes up a lot with remote head/gimbal work - I'm not a fan of the alternatives (joystick/fluid head emulation). It's bittersweet learning on a proper geared head like an Arrihead 2 as it's a lot more satisfying to operate on one of these than the remote opions - maybe I've just not found the right wheels.

I understand your connundrum. I grew up very broke in a council estate in North-West England (I imagine the US equivalent is a 'project') with zero industry connections. I went down the route of getting into a ton of debt to go to a practical film school in Edinburgh - mainly because I always wanted to try living somewhere else. I agree with the general consensus that film schools are a rip-off and the people teaching tend to have no clue but I would do it again in a heartbeat because getting 4 years of access to camera & lighting kit, projects/briefs, collaborators and a library that stocked pretty much every cinematography book and American Cinematographer issue ever written was incredibly helpful. And Edinburgh is by no means a major film-hub but I managed to start getting low level jobs and trying to work my way up as well as doing a lot of videography-type 'jobs'. So yes it was risky, and I've spent most of my life being flat-broke and terrified in an industry where it's beneficial to be both wealthy and well-connected but I was in a similar position as yourself about 14 years ago and now I make a living working as a DP. I've still (hopefully) got a long way to go and am definitely still in the early stages of my career but I've got no regrets about taking big risks with no guarantees. Take all of that with a huge pinch of salt because everyone has a different path but I'm just trying to highlight that there is something liberating about having nothing to lose. P.S. None of that would've happened without help from A LOT of people. I found that I got certain advantages by just being honest about where I am and asking people (rental houses, DPs, directors, crew, production companies, colourists, etc.) for favours. A remarkable amount of my peers early on didn't want to ask for help. Pride maybe? I don't know.

Hello all, I'm going to spend some time practicing operating a geared head as it seems like a pretty essential tool for operating. I've heard about techniques like attaching a pen on a stick and trying to write your name or trying to pan/tilt in a perfect diagonal but I wondered if anyone has any other exercises that I could practice to help me improve. I've seen the modded games/emulators that people use where you can follow a car around a track or some sort of sports match but I'll mainly be practing on an Arrihead 2 so looking for more 'analogue' exercises. Cheers!

I always thought that projecting through diffusion renders a different quality of light that feels more source-y and I prefer the look of bounced light but maybe I'm wrong and the different is negligible. Big litemats through a layer or two of diff sounds like a simpler and faster solution the next time I'm in this sort of situation.

Was talking more about bouncing than projecting through diffusion. Yes usually because I haven't had much space or a modifier that would spread a single source over the whole frame.

Hello all, I had a question regarding bouncing light. Specifically in low budget scenarios with no desk ops/DMX setups and often without a proper gaffer… Let’s say I’m making a big soft key light by bouncing multiple small sources into an 8x8 frame in a fairly cramped space (could be tungsten fresnels on dimmers or LED fixtures with their own dimmers) - I always find that it takes a while to get the balance of the different levels of the lights into the frame to get the desired look on the scene that I want. Partly cause I’m often running back and forth between the lights and the camera. Also just in terms of trying to fill the frame as much as possible with the right levels coming from the different lights, I find this takes a fair bit of tweaking to get just right and is never as simple as ‘just bounce 3 lights into that frame’. I’ve even had this situation with gaffers, where they get it all set up but it doesn’t look right until I’ve tweaked it to within an inch of its life. I always get what I’m after eventually so maybe this is a moot point but my question is whether there is a specific standardised system for setting something like this up? E.g. setting one fixture at a time and gradually increasing the size of the source. Again, I imagine in the world of desk ops and DMX this is all a lot simpler but just wanted to check if any DOPs or gaffers had any nuggets of wisdom for this sort of thing as I see myself still having to do this sort of setup a fair bit in the future. P.s. I found this a lot easier when I was starting out by using something like a 2k blonde to create a single large bounce source so maybe the answer lies in using single sources for bouncing but I’ve not found many decent open face equivalents in the LED world.

Hello all, I've got a lighting challenge that I'm unsure about. I'm shooting a commercial on a small studio set with a solid blue backdrop and one 'character'. For the opening I want to have a spot on the backdrop which silhouettes the character, before the spot gets killed and the main lighting for the rest of the ad faded up. My question is - in an attempt to get a solid white spotlight on a primary blue backdrop is it as simple as picking a 'complimentary' colour for the spotlight, e.g. yellow/red? Trying to apply some basic colour theory stuff which I've been reading up on but not put into practice too much yet. I'm unsure about the ability to achieve this effect in post as the character is also being lit by a dim blue light from a laptop/tablet whilst the white spot silhouettes them. Cheers!

Watched the first episode of the Rings of Power series - it's alright. I like the design/costume/general aesthetics - but... When will this obsession with wide lens/shallow DOF die? I find it so off-putting. Bright day exteriors where the back ground becomes nothing but blur and bokeh... two shots with only one character in focus... Close ups where only an eye is in focus... I feel like it's detracting from the storytelling - surely lighting and composition are enough without this massive 'blur radius'. I'm also not convinced of the argument that it's a way of making digital capture feel less 'sharp and clinical'. For me a good chunk of depth of field is a thousand times more cinematic. Just ranting and I know that it's a simple flavour of the month thing but it's distracting me from nearly every modern show/film I see (the DOF shrink between season 1 and 2 of Barry was insane and I had to stop watching). If anyone has any insights into why this is happening and when it will go away I'd appreciate hearing them

Mini LF I believe

I created it using a gradient map in Photoshop and based it on the test images in that article. Very rough/rushed/non-scientific but seems to work well enough. Also, had a friend mention that the previous LUT format wasn't working in his camera so here's an alternative download in case anyone has similar issues: https://we.tl/t-H31mmcntb9

Assuming everyone will have seen this https://www.fdtimes.com/2021/04/25/el-zone-by-ed-lachman-asc/ I'm very excited about this idea personally! Often been frustrated at relying on IRE-based interface when monitoring exposure and I can see myself enjoying a system based on stop values and something more closely resembling the zone system If anyone is interested made a gradient map .cube LUT version in PS. It's rough around the edges but I tested it against a V-log, log-c and BMD Film using 18% Grey cards for reference and it seems to correlate in a basic way: https://we.tl/t-D5WXAfJp89 (apologies, the colours are a bit off but it's close enough to be useful)