Cinemablography
Your friendly neighborhood film blog.
Know Thy Lens: Handy Lens Calculators
0337 days
How many times have you read an exchange like this online?
Rookie: Hey, I just bought camera XYZ. What lens will give me the same focal length as a 50mm on a full frame camera?
Old Salt: A 50mm lens is a 50mm lens no matter what camera you put it on.
Good Samaritan: I think you meant to ask about angle of view. You see, camera XYZ has a crop factor of 1.6, so to get the same angle of view as a 50mm lens on a full frame camera, you would need about a 30mm lens.
Rookie: So a 30mm on my camera is the same focal length as a 50mm on a full frame camera, right?
Old Salt: NO… A 50 is a 50 is a 50. Stupid kid.
Wordplay: My First and Favorite Screenwriting Resource
0340 days
What if you could get inspiration in convenient pill form? Just pop one in the morning and you’d be a writing machine all day. But alas, all the pharmaceutical funding goes to cancer, acne, and whatnot with nothing left to fight writer’s block.
That’s where Wordplay comes to the rescue. (more…)
American Cinematographer Magazine
0
“[Caravaggio's] The Calling confirmed for me something I’d read in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! The protagonist says: ‘…Do you mark how the wisteria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates the room as though (light-unimpeded) by a secret and attritive progress from mote to more of obscurities myriad components?‘ This phrase showed Faulkner was able to describe on a literary plane the ray of light that Caravaggio represented pictorially. Without having read that phrase, without having looked at that painting, I would not have been able to make The Conformist or Apocalypse Now.”
-Vittorio Storaro interviewed in American Cinematographer Sept ’07
Right now a few dozen American Cinematographer back issues are on sale
for a dollar each, I stocked up a while back. Digital image sensors are changing in exciting ways, but where you put the camera, how you compose a frame, and how you light a scene are more timeless. These back issues of ACM are a great way to avoid obsessing over new technology and find fresh inspiration.