Author Art Adams

Art Adams

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.

Narrative Theory
Why Style Matters

Creativity is a tremendously hard thing to quantify, and yet producers and directors want to know what they’re getting before they buy it. They want to see that a DP can do one or two things really well, and then they feel confident that a DP they haven’t worked with before can definitely deliver. That’s why tabletop DPs get stuck doing lots of tabletop, or visual effects DPs shoot lots of green screen and background plates: they can show that they do that really well, so that’s what they’ll be hired to do.

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Lighting
What Firelight and Windows Have in Common

Firelight and window light have a lot in common. They both require multiple light sources to look convincing. Here are my favorite tricks for reproducing both. I first learned the “strips of multicolored gels waved in front of a light” firelight trick in film school, and I never found it very convincing. I don’t get a lot of opportunities to use flame bars, and I know there are ways to emulate firelight using multiple china balls with different gels on them. My favorite technique came about by simply staring into a fireplace for a while.

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Lighting
The Joys of Lighting Flat

There’s one place in every set that’s never going to be seen, and that’s directly behind the camera. Light from this direction is generally considered uninteresting but if you have a nuanced eye you can create some really interesting looks by putting a light in the one spot that every film school teaches students to avoid.

Lighting direction is important, but so is the size of the source. A small non-diffused light placed directly behind the camera is generally doesn’t work well because it makes people and things look obviously lit. There are situations where this kind of lighting does work–we see it all the time in older movies when a female star has to look her best–but for modern work it feels a bit forced.

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Optical Science
The Pitfalls of Anamorphic

Focus is a huge issue in anamorphic, and everyone on the camera crew has to wrap their heads around which focal length lens does what. For example, in spherical cinematography a 50mm lens delivers a “normal” perspective, but in anamorphic the closest to this is the 80mm. The reason for this is that each anamorphic lens is really two lenses in one: it’s 80mm tall but 40mm wide, for a 2:1 squeeze. A spherical 40mm lens isn’t all that long and focus isn’t that big a deal in the horizontal axis, but the addition of an 80mm lens to the vertical axis cuts depth of field in half. A 40mm spherical lens has reasonable depth of field, but add an 80mm lens into that mix and suddenly you have to pay a LOT of attention just to make sure medium shots are in focus.

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Sony XDCAM
32 Takes: My First Spot with the Sony F5

Director Ian McCamey and I have done a lot of spots together, and when he calls I know he’s going to have some crazy fun idea that’s going to keep me up nights trying to figure out how to pull it off. That was certainly the case with our recent web spot for La Crema Winery (founded in 1979 and…

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Ultra HD
My Week Shooting 4K with an FS700 Prototype

Adam Wilt and I have had a 4K-enabled Sony FS700 to play with for a week. Come see what we’ve discovered about the latest entry into the 4K race to high resolution history. The FS700 has a lot in common with this camera — the Bell & Howell 2709 hand-cranked silent film camera (pictured right). It is 90 years old and it still works. I’m not saying that the FS700 is old or obsolete or can’t record sound; rather, I’m saying that, like the FS700, it’s possible to make beautiful images with the 2709 if you know what you’re doing. Adam and I will be presenting a 90 minute talk about shooting 4K on the FS700 this week at CineGear in Los Angeles. If you’re attending, please stop by the Sherry Lansing Theater at 2:15 on Saturday, June 1st.

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Post Production
Making the Sony F55 Look "Filmic" with Resolve 9

I’ve spent a long time learning to make HD footage look “filmic” without really knowing exactly what that meant. I’ve just picked up a bit of insight, however, and it’s permanently changed how I look at video and color. I’ve shot a number of projects using an Arri Alexa in WYSIWYG mode — for which I’m considered a bit of an oddity — but with it I can get great results with no more than minimal grading and clients love walking away with ProRes files whose look is 90% there. My problem is that I now have to do this with other cameras as Alexa’s price point is considered “high” in my market due to the release of several newer, cheaper and fairly capable cameras. I love the Alexa look, but my current task is to figure out how to get close to that look when the production doesn’t have the budget to rent one — or, more likely, in the event the production company owns their own camera.

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Post Production
Making the Sony F55 Look “Filmic” with Resolve 9

I’ve spent a long time learning to make HD footage look “filmic” without really knowing exactly what that meant. I’ve just picked up a bit of insight, however, and it’s permanently changed how I look at video and color. I’ve shot a number of projects using an Arri Alexa in WYSIWYG mode — for which I’m considered a bit of an oddity — but with it I can get great results with no more than minimal grading and clients love walking away with ProRes files whose look is 90% there. My problem is that I now have to do this with other cameras as Alexa’s price point is considered “high” in my market due to the release of several newer, cheaper and fairly capable cameras. I love the Alexa look, but my current task is to figure out how to get close to that look when the production doesn’t have the budget to rent one — or, more likely, in the event the production company owns their own camera.

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