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.
Ever wonder how a company’s background and philosophy affects product development? Let me tell you a little something about Arri and Alexa… I’m a geek. I read cinematography, videography and color textbooks for fun. I’m awful at math so I skip the equations and look for digestible nuggets of information that help me understand advanced concepts in intuitive ways. I…
Still photographers love histograms. Cinematographers hate them. Here’s why our world is so different from theirs in this regard… This is a normal histogram, pulled from Resolve 10. Histograms count pixels, nothing more, and they only tell us how many pixels in an image fall into a specific brightness range. Black is at the far left; white is at the…
Still photographers love histograms. Cinematographers hate them. Here’s why our world is so different from theirs in this regard… This is a normal histogram, pulled from Resolve 10. Histograms count pixels, nothing more, and they only tell us how many pixels in an image fall into a specific brightness range. Black is at the far left; white is at the…
Years ago I turned a low-end SD camera into a pinhole device by covering the lens port with black wrap and poking a hole in it. I decided to try again with a much higher-end camera. Here’s what happened… In times past, when dinosaurs roamed the earth with 480i cameras, I found myself sitting in a lit studio waiting for…
New OLED monitors are able to display most of the DCI P3 color space, something that was previously impossible to do without a digital projector and a very dark room. Some are saying that on-set monitoring in P3 is a natural next step given that most cameras out there can capture wide gamut color. Is this a good idea? Just…
Every time I download a new version of Resolve I have to fill out the little questionnaire that asks me what features I’d like to see added quickly. I always write, “Add a waveform scale that reads in percentages!” And Blackmagic Design never does. I’ve asked several people at Blackmagic why they don’t add this feature and the answer is…
Being detail oriented is a great thing. Obsessing over the wrong detail costs a production in both time, money and storytelling. Years ago I shot a scene where a character walks down a hallway into a sunlit room. There was a brief lighting transition where the actor stepped out of the fluorescent-lit hallway and into the sunny room, and for…
Ever since my days working in film I’ve tried to find some way to equate my sense of brightness to real world exposure. I learned to do this well with film, but HD has been a mystery… until now. On a recent Alexa shoot I gave up on the idea of running to the monitor and scrutinizing the waveform for…
One of the greatest things about the Sony F55 is that I can shoot S-Log2 inexpensively. One of the worst things about it is that I can’t see what I’m doing. Here’s how I worked around that. In my last two articles I spoke about shooting this music video for the band Wampire using a Sony F55 and beta firmware…
In my last article I wrote about lighting a dramatic library scene using only two lights. Here’s how I lit a rich, dreamy bar scene using the same two lights. Bay Area dot-coms are big on creature comforts. I shot in one last week that boasted a massage parlor in the basement and catered lunches every weekday. In the particular…