Director of photography Art Adams knew he wanted to look through cameras for a living at the age of 12. After ten years in Hollywood working on feature films, TV series, commercials, music videos, visual effects and docs he returned to his native San Francisco Bay Area, where he currently shoots commercials and high-end corporate marketing and branding projects. When Art isn’t shooting he consults on product design and marketing for a number of motion picture equipment manufacturers. His clients have included Sony, Arri, Canon, Tiffen, Schneider Optics, PRG, Cineo Lighting, Element Labs, Sound Devices and DSC Labs. His writing has appeared in HD Video Pro, American Cinematographer, Australian Cinematographer, Camera Operator Magazine and ProVideo Coalition. He is a current member of the International Cinematographers Guild, and a past active member of the SOC and SMPTE.
One of my guilty pleasures is watching the HBO series “True Blood.” It’s a campy vampire soap opera, true, but it’s also occasionally educational. Episode three of series seven got me thinking a lot about craft, and how it’s being lost… TV is where it’s at these days. When I was growing up, TV was a formulaic wasteland where shows…
I see a lot of really awful portfolio websites around, and it offends my marketing sensibilities. This is my attempt to make the showreel world a slightly better place. PRESENTATION IS IMPORTANT Showing your reel on Youtube or Vimeo is really unprofessional. It’s a bit like printing your resume on the back of paper that already has something written on it.…
Two shirts, two different colors, exactly the same fabric… why does one moire and one not? The answer goes to the root of how single sensor cameras work… The CEO wanted to wear his company’s shirt during the interview. I live in Silicon Valley, and a fair amount of my work is high-end corporate which translates roughly into “I shoot…
RED cameras have typically shown more accurate color response under daylight than under tungsten light. Dragon, however, is supposed to be a different beast altogether. Is it? Let’s take a look… A camera assistant based in Los Angeles told me that he’d been using a Schneider 1/2 CTB filter for tabletop work with RED’s Dragon sensor. “It just doesn’t distinguish…
“What is that?” my gaffer invariably jokes as I pull out my light meter on set. Meters are rare in the HD world, but I’m revisiting my film roots and using them more and more. These days I won’t be caught without them. Film was always a bit of a mystery to me. There’s something magical about making a series…
The first series of Sony OLED pro monitors looked green to me, and until recently I didn’t know why. It turned out I wasn’t hallucinating, and I now know a little more about what I didn’t know I didn’t know. A recent travel job saw me traipsing through three U.S. cities in six days. We carried two cameras with us,…
Question: What is in this reel that shows me what an amazing camera the Cion is? Answer: nothing. That doesn’t mean it isn’t amazing, but if it actually is amazing their marketing department is doing its damndest to keep it a secret… I hate to admit it, but bad marketing drives me nuts — especially when it’s by a company that…
The bread-and-butter work in my area is corporate marketing projects, and plenty of those involve talking head videos. And plenty of those talking heads wear white shirts. This is what I do about it… White shirts aren’t as deadly as they used to be. In the old SD and early HD days they were deadly, as the average white shirt…
I’ve waited a long time for a single sensor Varicam, and it looks like that wait may be coming to an end. But is it everything I want it to be? A look at Panasonic’s latest demo material says “Maybe yes, maybe no…” First, if you haven’t seen Panasonic’s Varicam 35 demo reel, take a look: There was a time,…
The answer is not as sexy as you think. It boils down to being curious, asking lots of annoying questions, and never assuming I know the real story. On a recent shoot in a distant city the data manager saw me going through all the monitor menus and scrutinizing every setting. “Aha!” I said, discovering that the monitor gamma was…