Ignacio Aguilar

I really love the use of hard light, saturated colors and high T/stops of these films, no matter who was responsible of the final look. I agree "Raiders" is timeless and is the best of the bunch, but "Temple of Doom", while more contemporary looking, was overall entertaining and very well done -except for some effects shots-. The interaction between Ford and Connery was really nice on "Crusade" and that film looks great too. While I don't expect that much from the upcoming "Indy 4" as a film, I must admit that I'm anxious to see how it will perform visually and which techniques developed or improved since the 1980's will be employed by the filmakers (CGI, DI, the Super-35 format, etc). At least I hope that it will be more faithful to the original films in that regard than the new "Star Wars" films to their counterparts.

"The Illusionist": I found the DI a bit intrusive and overdone, though I loved the look of the early flashback scene. Well lit by Pope, but they relied too much on endless close-ups, which always make the cinematography a bit less interesting IMHO. "The Prestige": Beautiful anamorphic photography for a very natural look, all achieved in camera (no DI) through very low light levels, wide-open lenses and push-processed film stocks (the blacks suffer a bit at times, but the high-contrast look is really appealing). The images also are really attractive and lush, while Pfister's minimalist lighting goes beyond "Batman Begins" for a more classic & source motivated approach. Really nice and one of the year's best.

I've always wondered the opposite thing: who would have been the DP for the remaining scenes of "Superman II" if Donner had been able to finish them? The same applies for "Tess": I've always wondered why Polanski hired Ghislain Cloquet to finish the film after Unsworth's death, because I don't think Cloquet (who anyway did a job good an won the Oscar) had been Polanski's first choice as a replacement if he had had enough time to bring another DP from the UK or USA.

The last reel from "Lord Jim" and overall day exteriors are amazing, but I can't stand the middle section, with those lengthy scenes featuring day-for-night stuff.

Young himself once said "Doctor Zhivago" was his favorite work for Lean, as it let him to show his all his lighting skills. It was shot entirely on sets, whereas "Lawrence of Arabia" was pretty much shot on location, and it shows at times (remember those tracking shots in the corridors with a 10K just behind the camera or the multiple shadows of the Cairo interiors?). "Ryan Daughter's" is great, of course (you can't never forget the west coast of Ireland... in Super Panavision), but some of the best work he ever did shows IMHO on "Nicholas and Alexandra" (1971), which is pretty similar to "Doctor Zhivago" but a bit softer and colorful. And as far as I know, he was pretty fond of the B&W "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (1939).

I may be wrong, but I believe Hugh Hudson travelled to Turkey to direct second unit work for "Midnight Express", with Bernard Lutic as cinematographer. And don't forget about John Alcott, who photographed "Greystoke" for Hudson right after "Chariots of Fire", and a few years before "Revolution". Plus Alcott re-introduced the Super-35 format on that film and is sure he convinced Hudson about its advantages, as all his following films after "Greystoke" have used it to achieve a 2.35 ratio (even "Revolution" was one the first Super-35 films after "Greystoke", together with Lawrence Kasdan's "Silverado" and Alcott's own "Baby, The Secret of the Lost Legend"). As for Lester, I haven't seen all his films, but "Juggernaut" is my favorite in terms of cinematography. Gerry Fisher's work is still Watkinesque, but a bit darker and contrasty, grainy and documentary at times. And the camera work (by Ernest Day, no less) is superb. Compare it to "The Towering Inferno", "The Poseidon Adventure" or other disaster film of the era: "Juggernaut" looks equally good but completely different and fresh, almost like "United 93" opposed to "Titanic".

The cinematographers guild web site features an interview with Allen Daviau (who shot "E.T.", Spielberg's first non-anamorphic theatrical film) in which he covers this subject:

In my case, my biggest and early influence was Stanley Kubrick. I first saw "The Shining" on TV a Friday night my parents were not home, and as the movie went more and more scary I remember how my eyes couldn't look anywhere but at the TV screen. I got nightmares from the film for a while, but then I started to watch the film over and over again. And I realized how different was this film's visual style from every other movie from the 50's, 60's 70's and early 80's, with its cold light coming through the windows, the practicals and the use of the Steadicam. By the time I was 14 I had seen every Kubrick film, and the candlelit interiors from "Barry Lyndon" blew my interest on cinematography. For me, it was a real pleasure to be able to watch another Kubrick ("EWS") at the time of its original release. It was grainy as hell, but most of it was lit by practicals and looked amazing. Kubrick and his cinematographers developed my taste for a natural & realistic look in movies, so it's not surprising that I fell in love with cinematographers like David Watkin, the early Owen Roizman or Gordon Willis while I was still learning the basics of cinematography (when I first saw "Klute" I noticed where the look of "Se7en" came from!). And then I embraced the style of the people who followed those guys (Peter Hyams, Ridley and Tony Scott, the early Storaro) as an stylization of their approach. Now I admire lots of cinematographers from very different times, styles and countries (Gregg Toland, Freddie Young, Asakazu Nakai, Kazuo Migayawa, Geoffrey Unsworth, Tonino Delli Colli, Stanley Cortez, Richard Kline, Bruce Surtees, Robert Richardson, Emmanuel Lubezki... the list could be endless), but everytime I take a picture or light a set I go back to my roots, because it's what still feels right for me.

Some major films haven't been released yet in Spain ("Flags" and "Letters From Iwo Jima", "Marie Antoinette", "Dreamgirls", "Apocalypto", "The Fountain", "The Good Shepherd", "The Prestige", "Blood Diamond"), so among the 2006 films I've seen so far I would pick, in no particular order: -"Ask the Dust", Caleb Deschanel, ASC. Deschanel's classic & romantic approach and the stunning night beach secuence makes this film worth a watch. -"A Good Year", Philippe Le Sourd. It's not Ridley's best film, but some single-source lighting and endless warm tones that would made David Watkin very proud of. -"The Black Dahlia", Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC. Great camera moves, compositions and a very nice noir style. Hard lights through Venetian blinds still rocks. -"Casino Royale", Phil Méheux, BSC. Being a Bond fan, I enjoyed a lot Méheux's colorful comeback to the classic 007 style. -"United 93", Barry Ackroyd, BSC. Not exactly my cup of tea in terms of lighting, but Ackroyd's camera contributed a lot to the storytelling (and this film may well be my favourite film of the year). -"Children of Men", Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC. Lubezki contributes to Cuaron's inspired direction with the unlit & rough style he developed for "The New World", showing us some of the most brilliant operating of the decade in some impressive continuous shots. I think he deserves all the major cinematography awards. -"Miami Vice", Dion Beebe, ASC, ACS. An stylistic departure from "Collateral", with very nice hard lit night exteriors combined with very slick HD daytime photography. Really cool. I was left cold by "Babel" (Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC) and I wasn't impressed either by "Perfume" (Frank Griebe), "World Trade Center" (Seamus McGarvey, BSC), "Goya's Ghosts" (Javier Aguirresarobe, AEC), "Deja Vu" (Paul Cameron, ASC), "Inside Man" (Matthew Libatique, ASC), "Pirates of the Caribbean" (Dariusz Wolski, ASC), "Volver" (José Luis Alcaine, AEC), "Poseidon" (John Seale, ASC, ACS), "V for Vendetta" (Adrian Biddle, BSC) and least of all by "The Departed" (Michael Ballhaus, ASC, BVK). But the greatest disappointment of the year probably came from Christopher Doyle on "Lady in the Water", which looked uninteresting to my eyes due to its blandness and softness. Even it was shot in Spain with Spanish money, I refused to watch "Pan's Labyrinth" because I disliked every prior Del Toro film (except for "El Espinazo del Diablo", which was OK). It now seems that I'll have to take a look at it, at the end.

Thank you all. I'll probably keep asking questions while we are doing the prep. :)

Yes, I know that I should carry some diopters, but I was worried about them being useful for this situation. The problem is that I don't want to limit ourselves to certain camera positions and angles. Perhaps we'll end up avoiding the difficult angles, but I want it to be because of the director's artistic vision, not because our technical limitations with the focus. We don't have a car yet, so the wise choice will be to use a big one, like a 4x4 or something like that. Thank you, Max. The FAQ is really useful and I've read it plenty of times. I haven't seen yet the Hawks' performance on a movie screen ("Blood Diamond" will fix it), but even if their look fits the mood of our short, I'm still would be worried about their weight (though combined with an Arri 235 it may be still acceptable). I will have an assistant with 35mm experience, but most of the crew comes -even the director- from a video background and I don't want to overwhelm them with the limitations of a 20kg camera package. Some video people still feel annoyed when they notice you can't zoom a prime lens or when they notice you can't achieve deep-focus effects on night exteriors and I don't want to add another con.

I'm about to start prep on a 35mm short we want to shoot using anamorphic lenses. We will do a photochemical finish to get a 35mm anamorphic print. There will be just two or three words of dialogue, so we can shoot it with a MOS camera and add the sound later. Some shots will be house interiors, but half of the short will show an actor while he's driving a car at night and it's raining outside. The director wants handheld shots inside the car and statics throughout the windshield. We want heavy distorted backgrounds and be able capture the street's lights as hot as possible, so I know that I'll probably will end up shooting wide-open. We won't change distance between the camera and the subject during shots, thus making focus pulling much easier. What we want, the budget and the logistics tell me that I should choose C-Series anamorphics from Panavision, as they look more "organic", distort while shooting wide-open, tend to flare and are the lightest anamorphic lenses out there, which are our needs for this short. I know they only open up to T/2.3 or T/2.8, but I'll be shooting 5218 (500 T, rated at 320 or 400 ASA) and I will push it one stop if necessary. I think that I'll be using the 50mm or the 75mm on the car but... do you think that I may have problems focusing the driver from the right front seat? I don't think so, but I don't want negative surprises. Is there a wiser choice than the C-Series? Should I try any other lenses (E-Series, Primos, Hawks)? I don't think JDC and Technovision anamorphics are available here in Spain. Any other anamorphic advise? Please, don't tell me that I should stick to spherical SuperSpeeds ;)

I didn't like the book at all and I went to see the film just because I thought that it would be impossible to translate it to images. But Tykwer proves how wrong I was. He uses all the cinematic language at his hand to describe with images what Patrick Süskind described with words (which wasn't an easy task, either) and definetly succeds. And though the film is long and bit dense at times, I found it much more enjoyable than it's literary counterpart. The cinematography itself is OK, but everyframe looks "lit" and nice and I would have preffered a more realistic approach to the period and its light sources. I believe it was shot with the new Master Primes and it looks very sharp (except for the zoom shots, which are a bit softer), but thanks to the D.I. the skin tones were really unnatural.

I never got the chance of watching an original negative to 70mm blow-up, so my two cents would probably go to "Titanic". The daylight scenes (5245 50D) looked great and the overexposed 5279 (500T, rated at 320) hold up pretty well. Both "T2" and "True Lies" also were some of the richest S-35 optical blow-ups. Though DIs have improved a lot lately and now retain most of the quality of the original photography, I still miss optical blow-ups everytime I see fake skin tones and softness due to the use of digital noise reduction.

I didn't know it... and I never would have guessed! The location work from "Saturday Night Fever" and "Dressed to Kill" (both shot by Bode) looks heavy filtrated at times.

I enjoy quite a lot the photographic style used by James Crabe for the first film, mixing influences from Owen Roizman, Bruce Surtees and other DPs who started the 1970's trend towards realism with the old school of color cinematography, which still was very fond of hard sources to achieve theatrical lighting effects (take a look at the sculptural quality of the opening scene). And those magic-hour & Steadicam tracking shots, so innovative back then, are still gorgeus to look at.

"Chariots of Fire" also shows some three-blade iris shots. I believe the music video "Thriller" (shot by Bob Paynter, BSC) also had that triangular bokeh.

It was more apparent on the low-light scenes, but I believe that I saw it two or three times on daylight scenes which should have been originated on film. The effect was so weird that at first I thought that they'd used some diffusion filter with the lenses wide-open and I was seeing the filter pattern itself or something like that. I wasn't aware of the problem prior to watching the film (and thus I wasn't paying special attention to it), that's why when I read this post I was surprised because nobody mentions those bands on the non-genesis stuff. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I saw I assumed only some night shots and the "time-window" scenes were shot digitally, with the rest being originated in Super-35.

I've seen the film today. I didn't find its visuals as inspired as "Man on Fire", but both the look and film are OK. Any info about which film stocks they used? The digital vertical lines are pretty obvious on that night scene between Denzel and Val and on the time window scenes, but I think I've seen them too on daylight exteriors stuff, which is supposed to have been shot on film...

I'm a big anamorphic supporter, but Casino Royale's DI was good enough to make me forget -most of the time- that it's a Super-35 & Cooke S4 effort. The film is very sharp -perhaps the sharpest 2K DI I've seen so far- and pretty much free of unwanted digital artifacts. Only a few instances where they added or reduced grain in post revealed the digital grading. Today I've seen too another Super 35 film, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (dir: Tom Tykwer, DP Frank Griebe) and it also looked very sharp (they used the new Zeiss Master Primes), but the DI was overdone and introduced unnatural colors. The colors and skin tones were much more natural on Casino Royale. Phil Meheux's work easily is the best in the series since... GoldenEye. And it's not a coincidence that both films were directed by Martin Campbell, a director who really understands the series. I agree with Adam about Meheux's hard keys and overuse fill, but his lighting style also makes Casino Royale much more classical and lush. Eva Green has some gorgeus close-ups, something Meheux also did for Catherine Zeta-Jones on the first Zorro film. The B&W segments are so-so, but I find Meheux's overall work to be really nice, so I hope he'll back for the next film.

Don't forget either that according to an extended rumor, Alan Hume would have had a falling out with the producers of the film and it would have promoted Alec Mills (Hume's longtime camera operator) to DP for the last weeks of the shooting.

I wasn't expecting too much from a romantic film directed by Ridley Scott, and certaintly he won't he get any new fan with this picture. It's predictable and adds nothing to his filmography, but it doesn't hurt either as it's quite light and charming, with beautiful women and locations. On the other hand, Philippe Le Sourd's cinematography is stunning and surprisingly goes back to that style that people like Ridley and Tony Scott, Alan Parker, Russell Mulcahy or Adrian Lyne brought to movies almost thirty years ago in a purity I hadn't seen since "Revenge" (1990) or "1492" (1992): everything here is backlit, every shot is warm and beautiful and every shot looks really natural, thanks to the absence of fill light on the characters or shadow areas. And the interiors look quite dark all the time and Le Sourd just lits them with a large, single soft source from outside the windows to create a nice contrast. The sets are even smoked and Ridley uses his trademark telephoto lenses. It could have been the same if done, let's say, in 1985. Those who dislike this (now) classic approach won't like Le Sourd's cinematography, but I feel people (like myself) who still love the early Michael Seresin, Frank Tidy, Stephen Goldblatt or (the Storaro influenced) Jeffrey Kimball will enjoy his work inmensely. Don't miss it.

Ballhaus has never been my cup of tea either, and this film has proven it once more. Other than Scorsese's trademark travellings & zooms shots, no visual element caught my interest. The grain and sharpness were very inconsistent throughout and I still feel Ballhaus' use of fill light is really old-fashioned. It also makes everything flatter than I like. And I've just seen "Infernal Affairs", which is not a great film either, but at least don't takes itself so seriously and tells the story in a very straighforward manner. Anybody knows which anamorphic lenses did they use on this one? The film was shot at wide apertures (I would say T/2-2.8 split) and there are lots of optical aberrations, much more than what I'm used to with modern anamorphics. That's why I guess they used some old optics, but I can't tell for sure as I've seen it on DVD.

I took the 2.35:1 frames from the trailer featured in the Spanish DVD for the Redux version. The original release was already warm (2nd frame for each comparison, old Paramount DVD); it seems that's the trailer which was left untimed.

This film had a difficult production, and three DPs worked on it. Haskell Wexler started the shooting, but he was fired by Milos Forman and the producers and was replaced by Bill Butler (Bulter ALSO replaced Wexler on "The Conversation" the previous year!). But Butler wasn't available to finish the film due to previous commitments, so William A. Fraker had to shot the last week. I think that the look of the film is good and fits very well the story. Most of it looks pretty consistent, too, which is a good thing when you consider those circunstances. My only complaint would be the use of some diffusion filters (perhaps a mix of Mitchell diffusers, low-cons & corals) on some outdoor scenes (the basket game, the boat, etc), which make them a bit different from the rest of the picture. I believe Fraker shot them, as he was using these filter packs back them, but that's my guess based on his usual style.