Also, it gets mentioned a lot but it hasn't been in this thread yet.

What is one of the most widely acclaimed films in terms of its cinematography? Citizen Kane. And what was one of the things the D.P. Gregg Toland used prevalently to craft the look of the film? Deeper focus than was common at the time.

Equally, I feel the shallow DOF can help to communicate a more subjective experience of a scene. The key (as so many people touched on earlier) is what do you choose to communicate.

@ttancredi
The Olympus 9-18mm f4-5.6 lenses work quite well and auto-focus on both GH2 and GH1. I actually like the size and handling of the legacy Four-Thirds model better than the Micro 4/3, which is a super-compact, collapsible design.

The bigger dslr sensor made shallower dof possible. Basically moving bokeh. It looks great, but It's wrong to say deeper dof is less cinematic. Although it's harder to make scenes in deeper dof cinematic looking, more messages can be visualized through deeper dof. e.g. Journalism photography and 3D movies in deep dof.

I'm not against big sensors though. The recent researches have shown that the dslrs have fantastic low light performance. I think that's the most important aspect about using bigger sensors.

I do have 1.4 primes, and they do come in handy at night. But they stay on a tripod at carefully calibrated focus. I will be happy with optically better designed 2.8 lenses. Call me lazy, but it's a whole lot easier to operate FF at 2.8 than 1.4. Also there is no image stabilization at faster than 2.8. If needed, jack up the ISO. Low light performance of future digital cameras will get better.

I wanna get comfortable with deeper dof for both photo and video. It seems like future proof skill. Don't let sensor size and lens speed be bottleneck. Who knows? One day I might get paid for taking video with my client's iPhone.Haha.

For me, its less about a certain aperture setting, and much more about what needs to be emphasized/in focus versus minimized/out of focus in a given shot. That, above all else, is why I'm so disgusted by most hyper-shallow FF shots (the classic situation where the whole face is not in focus, for example). The whole face certainly should almost always (excepting for rare special effect) be entirely in focus. Stop down to that point, or a little farther even. If there is need to emphasize the entirety of the frame's content, by all means stop down to deeper DOF. I don't think there's any reason to stick to one or the other (shallow or deep). hyper-shallow can be used to great effect, as can very deep, and I doubt anyone will chastise you or scoff at your film should you use both to good effect in the same piece.

LIGHTING.

The above plus good lenses and no sharpening in camera…

@stonebat

I don't think deep DOF(in general) looks less cinematic at all. I only think it looks less cinematic on the gh2 (DSLRs) . A dialogue scene shot on any larger sensor is convincing, while wide open shots are close to disaster..

In fact, I caught myself finding lars von trier's Melancholia very "Vimeoish" and embarassing due to abusive pretentious slow mo and shallow DOF.

@nomad Do you know if the olympus have sharpening in camera? and if so, any wide angles lens to recommend? ( I need small, so Tokina wouldn't do it) too expensive...

@tida Would you have any footage to share?

@nomad

they do talk with the camera. AF works. No sure how sharpening goes though

@StoneBat In terms of cinematic deep DOF, one of the keys is to really look carefully at the "Mise en scène" (on the off chance that's an unfamiliar term, I put in the WikiPedia link but I'm not trying to be patronizing ).

For inspiration, here's a short list of films that do great things with deep DOF at various points that you might have seen that can give inspiration: Hero, Blade Runner, Patton, Citizen Kane. I'll take Patton as an example for a moment to give a sense of something I frequently try to do in my own work.

In that film, the use of large, wide, deep DOF shots is used to give a sense of the scope of what the character is facing, what the world is like and how things expand and extend from beyond the characters. In order to capture something like that in your work, find a smaller focus that intrigues you and that start to look at what the larger composition you can build around that is.

It doesn't all have to be done in frame at once, but if you are using deep DOF, then you can move from the core of the scene through the next area(s) of interest without changing DOF. The key is to make the action deliberate, to develop an intuitive sense for what effect each variable will have.

For instance, if you artificially cool the white balance when shooting around a lot of streetlights at night, the viewers perception of the way the light bleeds into the scene can change and any characters in the scene begin to seem either "clearer" (in their subjective experience) or more isolated. Context becomes the key.

So before you start shooting, try to look at the places you can setup or take the shot, and choose a place that either offers one really interesting pathway or that has several interesting ways you can go. There's a bridge nearby that I shot over 50 times in one year - if someone explained a shot to me, I would know exactly where to go, how to aim and what lens to use before I ever got there because it's second nature by now. Practice is key.

As mentioned earlier, lighting is really important, and for landscapes or interesting structures, this doesn't just mean sunrise and sunset. Look at any direct or reflected light that might be up in the area for night shots, use the flares from them to your advantage (by having them break up a shot in an interesting way) or find a way to aim away from them while maintaining interest in the shot. Use clouds as a framing element and capture changes in the lighting to keep a sense of dynamic immediacy. The options are endless.

But one of the most basic things you can do, is to ask yourself a few questions before you start shooting.
1) What do I want the viewer to feel?
2) Why am I choosing a stationary shot or moving shot? What is the experience I'm trying to create?
3) What do I feel right now and how can I use that in the shot I'm doing?
4) Where is my eye drawn and why?

As you look at playback from the first shot (if you have the option of immediately doing so), take a moment to bypass your usual technical considerations and monitor your body's response. When do your muscles tighten versus relax?

When do your eyes start to glaze over and stop seeing what's there or start to bat around not looking at one point? In the case of the former, look at what you can do to enhance the interest in the scene (use more of a Dutch angle or choose your framing more carefully by changing your distance from the subject or your lens length, etc.) In the case of the latter, start to look at what you can do to bring greater balance into the scene (open up more sky or reduce the number of contrasting angles or colors or adjust the white balance to bring things closer to the emotional spectrum you have in mind, etc.) Of course if you want to convey chaos (for a short period of time) then sometimes the "flitting eyes" experience can be a good thing.

Basically, the key to a good shot with deep DOF is to go a little deeper with your process, make yourself a bit more accessible to the totality of the scene. If a shallow DOF shot asks you to look at or inside a character directly, a deep DOF shot tends to explore relationships more. And (in my humble opinion) you can't be honest in your relationship to a shot like that without asking (either consciously or unconsciously) what do I ask of this shot and what does it ask of me to give me that?

Anyway, that's one of the things I teach my clients in my proprietary processes that I've developed since the late 90s, some of which build off of preceding work by my father in Cybernetic Transposition. If they help you, great. If not, I'm sure others will volunteer equally valid techniques that suit different personalities. :)

@stonebat

my personal pseudo-cinematic lens rules:
have something in the foreground, something in the background
if you have nothing to contrast before-back, shoot anamorphic or crop to 2.35 (Actually shoot as little as possible at infinity, unless with an anamorphic or cropped to 2.35. :))

of course the rule is DOF = long -> long lenses stopped down,
but DOF = not too long -> short lenses not focused at infinity (unless shooting pseudo-anamorphic or with something blurred contrasting in foreground)


maybe too simple? i could shoot cinematic stuff with my HV20 when zoomed in and stopped down (and slightly underexposed of course)

Another wasted Sunday :)

@ghostlayer

It's fairly easy to distinguish cinematic work from videoish work. It depends on how far a maker or a production team has gone to achieve their desired intension. It doesn't really matter whether it's a set of working gears, a bag full of in-camera and post-processing tricks, a good script, a good narration, or good acting. You know... something enticing viewers. Although youtube has a bunch of crappy videos enticing gozillions of viewers, I bet most viewers wouldn't watch same youtube video twice. The final artifact should entice viewers more than a few times. But I just don't know how. Haha. Prolly it must come from learning experience based on the good old trial and error.

I watched your video about 5 times. Nice work.

superbly shot, @ghostlayer