5 Habits To Become A Better Cinematographer (starting out)

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

These are tips commonly looked over by new-comers that will instantly add quality to your work.

1. Light Everything: It may seem obvious to some but it’s one of the habits you realize was your biggest excuse for quicker shots. It also helps you think again when a set seemingly looks good with just natural light. If your shooting an interior, you should always be lighting your set. If your shooting an exterior, more than likely you should be cutting, diffusing, removing light etc.

Whether it was a tight schedule, being timid around a client/producer or not knowing exactly what to do; throwing up a light to only improve an image 10%-20% was something easily casted aside to push production along. But learning to handle the pressure and support the lighting decision made each shot better than the last. After a few months of breaking this habit in, not only will you get better at lighting and generally increasing the quality of your work, you’ll learn how to better communicate with talent and crew to explain why your there in the first place.

When lighting isn’t an option there is Blocking to save the day.

Blocking: A space, inside or out, can have great lighting, but if the blocking is off you won’t be able to utilize the gift of the available light. The best way to learn the best way to block a scene or shot is to learn the basics of how light reacts to subjects based on its direction ie. from the side, back and front.

Here are some resources to learn more:

*Cooke Optics YT, Meet the Gaffer , Cinematography Database Breakdowns*

2. Native ISO (Within Reason): There are multiple reasons to using certain ISO’s on certain camera systems such as Noise Level, Dynamic Range and General Image Quality and there may be more native ISO/ASA for your camera than you think, not even counting dual native ISO.

Most ENG or Digital Cinema Cameras will have a native ISO around 800, which is more than enough to handle most production situations. Run & Gun is another beast, but that might fall into the Videographer category. I have always felt the term Low-Light was never a fault of any Camera. If a scene is too dark, it needs a light, not a digital gain to the image. Also it might be good to know ISO varies in different situations. The native setting will most of the time reign supreme but filming at lower ISO’s for darker scenes help keep shadows rich and detailed. In the same ilk filming at 1600 for a extremely bright exterior may give you cleaner highlights due to the Dynamic Range shifting. But that is a discussion for another time. A word of wisdom would be ISO 800 (or whatever your native is) is for the better but I personally would never go below or above ISO 400–1600. 1600 being an absolute last resort.

3. Stopping Down: We all love shallow depth of field and the look of a 24mm on Full Frame wide-open and close up. But Shooting wide-open on 90% of lenses (especially ones widely available to beginners and novices) lose a lot of detail wide open.

F/1.8 is fun but its rarely practical or called for in mood. Shooting around f/4 has gotten a bad wrap for no reason. Its highly detailed, easy to control focus and if you really want bokeh or shallow DOF, just use a longer lens. Which brings us to our next topic.

4. Lens Compression: This was something I heard about, knew about and still never completely understood until I had a decent lens set. It will take some experimenting to truly understand how to utilize but for example: You have a space you want all in frame. Instinctively you might think to use a wide lens but the look it gives off will not be what you had in mind due to warping and distance.

The way to look at Lens Compression is, if you have a wider area to be shown, and want to avoid the above mentioned distortions of wider lenses; use a longer lens and back the camera up. Its not always doable in certain locations but practicing this technique, no matter the size of your space can really teach you how and when to use different focal lengths. Ie. Wides for close ups, Tights for Wides and vice versa for different effects.

5. Colors: Such a broad topic, but extremely fundamental to our craft. There are 3 sub-categories to this section. White Balance(Camera)/Color Temperature(Lights), Coloring (Post-Production) & Art Dept.(What is in frame). You could some beautiful lighting, interesting composition and a rich scene to capture but if your color is off, the positives of the shot are overshadowed by the poor color.

Color Temp: To start off with the obvious, most people put up a Daylight Balanced light (5600K) or are filming outdoors (misnomer that all outdoor shots are 5600K as well) so they set the camera to 5600K. But that is just a piece of the pie. When you walk into a room, look around at all the different light sources. The Oven might have a tungsten bleed, if ever so subtle, and the window at 10 am might seem to have a daylight temperature bleeding in, but the lamp across the room has eco-friendly bulb in it (these vary, but for the sake of example, lets say 4500K). A light meter is great or even a light meter app on your phone to really tell which spot is in which kelvin reading. But even without it; if you balance for the sunlight, you might washout the other accents in the room like the lamp or the oven, as subtle as they are.

Often DP’s will shoot at a medium of all the kelvin readings to accurately display the colors of each light source. (Note: not only is getting something as subtle as the oven light accurate on camera, its more important to know that subtle amount of gold and orange that is contaminating the rest of the room. So its best practice to check the color reading of the area your filming because contamination, no matter how little, will show up on camera more than it appears to the eye).

Coloring: Learning to properly color your footage is daunting, but having the slightest grasp on how to do it on your own (LUTs or no LUTs) is going to benefit you greatly. Most ENG and Digital Cinema Cameras offer LOG and LOG-like color profiles. At the vary least, learn how to shoot with a LOG profile and if your resourceful, find time to learn how to correct and grade LOG footage. You’ll be more valuable as DP and filmmaker in general if this little learning curve is under your belt.

Art Dept.: This section might be out of the wheel-house for those of you who aren’t apart of pre-production or assisting in direction but its good principle to think about when blocking. For Camera & Electric we can control the color being casted onto the scene and the color being rendered into the camera but for those of us with a say in production; it might be good to know what color palette the project is aiming for and how that can productively play with the lighting to enrich the visuals rather than fight against them. After all, the camera only captures what’s in front of it. If the scene looks bad, there is nothing in the world that camera could do to fix it or make it look better.

These five habits changed my cinematography beyond what I thought I was capable of. Practice each habit as often as you can, and you’ll see your work flourish as well!