Shooting night scenes nearly always requires at least a passing sense of moonlight. The wash of soft overhead ‘blue’/daylight light at night has long been the staple of Hollywood night scenes. A remarkable 239 000 miles from earth, this planet offers a source of bounced light at night. It catches the daylight of the sun and bounces it back into our darkness. For tungsten balanced eyes at night this appears blue.
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A recent shoot took me on a monumental photographic journey across the States with maestro director Chris Holt. From North West to South East… a deep zig zag cut through the American landscape as we traced the dark journey of our infamous protagonist.
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A shoot recently took me to the North of Namibia to film with the nomadic Himba tribe.
Conditions were as hot and dusty as you might expect from the harsh desert environment and dust devils plagued our equipment daily. And then into this dry, arid, almost monochromatic landscape the Himba people emerged, bringing a sense of colour and costumed majesty that I found mesmerising, and a joy to photograph.
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Handheld camera work is probably the most pervasive form of motion photography... from news gathering, to 'observational documentaries, to iPhone footage: the camera in the hand is everywhere. And its visual signature is strong, unambiguous, human... we somehow know that it is closer to the 'truth' … to the un-augmented reality of life.
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Recently it was suggested to me that we shoot a film on a 'normal' lens... a 50mm. Although I understood in essence what the director meant, as I began to unpack this notion both for him and for myself I found that the concept exploded. At the heart of his desire to keep the lens choice simple and unaffected was almost everything that is at stake in the cinematographic process. In his 'normal' lens request was the desire for an un-augmented, degree zero, human point of view that has haunted almost every filmmaker.
A beauty commercial for Finnish brand Cutrin called for a meeting of landscape with the soul of Finnish femininity. Maestro director Michael Lindsay aimed to collide the change of seasons and landscapes with a feminine Finnish 'Sisu'... to explore the beauty and resilience that is built through this drama. The shoot was to begin in the Arctic North and then finish in the South, in the beautiful rocky coastline of the Finnish Baltic.
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For a promo for Tigi the brief from the creative team was to find the sympathetic movement of lighting, camera and subject... as if all in moved in sync to the same score.
We wanted the lighting to go from bold silhouettes to full light, together with a dolly move towards the subjects. The silhouette backgrounds were to roll and pulse with the same sense of pace and motion across the colour spectrum.
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Shooting in the dramatic Norwegian Arctic with a Red Magnesium Weapon A cam and a Red Epic Dragon in a DJI Ronin Gimbal.
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