The presentation of moving pictures as a series of photographic images recorded and reproduced in rapid succession, the eye's persistence of vision giving the impression of continuous movement. Film in continuous strips provided the material for Edison's pioneer Kinetoscope camera of 1891, but projecting the image on a screen for a large audience originated with the Lumière brothers in 1895, establishing the film production and cinema industries. Pictures were exposed in the camera at a rate of 16 per second, the film being held stationary for each exposure and then advanced one frame at a time while a shutter obscured the lens. After developing this film as a negative, a positive print was made for projection, again with an intermittent mechanism and shutter. In the late 1920s synchronized sound was added to the picture presentation, at first from separate disc records but after 1927 from a sound track on the film itself, the frame rate being increased to 24 pictures per second. Colour cinematography developed in the 1930s but did not become general for another 20 years, when various forms of wide-screen presentation in the cinema were extensively adopted.
Cinematography [Greek: kine (movement) and graphos (writing)], is the discipline of making lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for the cinema.
The first attempt at cinematography can be tracked back to the world's first motion picture film, Roundhay Garden Scene featuring dancers.
Cinematography is an art form unique to motion pictures. Although the exposing of images on light-sensitive elements dates back to the early 1800s, motion pictures demanded a new form of photography and new aesthetic techniques.
In the infancy of motion pictures, the cinematographer was usually also the director and the person physically handling the camera. With the advent of artificial lighting and faster (more light sensitive) film stocks, in addition to technological advancements in optics and various techniques such as color film and widescreen, the technical aspects of cinematography necessitated a specialist in that area.
In 1919, in Hollywood, the new motion picture capital of the world, one of the first (and still existing) trade societies was formed: the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), which stood to recognize the cinematographer's contribution to the art and science of motion picture making.
The ASC defines cinematography as:
a creative and intrepretive process that culminates in the authorship of an original work of art rather than the simple recording of a physical event.Aspects of cinematography
Numerous aspects contribute to the art of cinematography.
Film stock
Cinematography begins with rolls of film. Advancements in film emulsion and grain structure have led to a wide range of film stocks available to cinematographers. The selection of a film stock is one of the first decisions they must make during any film production.
Aside from the film gauge selection — 8 mm (amateur), 16 mm (semi-professional), 35 mm (professional) and 65 mm (epic photography, rarely used except in special event venues) — the cinematographer has a selection of stocks in reversal (which, when developed, create a positive image) and negative formats along with a wide range of film speeds (varying sensitivity to light) from ISO 50 (slow, least sensitive to light) to 800 (very fast, extremely sensitive to light) and differing response to color (low saturation, high saturation) and contrast (varying levels between pure black (no exposure) and pure white (complete overexposure)).
Advancements and adjustments to nearly all gauges of film created the "super" variety wherein the area of the film used to capture a single frame of an image is expanded, although the physical gauge of the film remains the same. Super 8 mm, Super 16 mm and Super 35 mm are all formats that utilize more of the overall film area for the image than their "regular" non-super counterparts.
The larger the film gauge, the higher the overall image resolution clarity and technical quality.
In the realm of digital imaging, various film stocks are no longer applicable, but the cameras themselves feature image adjustment capabilities that go far beyond the abilities of one particular film stock. The cameras can be adjusted to capture more or less color sensitivity, more or less image contrast, be more or less sensitive to light and so forth. It should be mentioned that the digital method of image adjustments (ISO, contrast etc) are executed by estimating the same adjustments that would take place if actual film were in use and are thus vunerable to the cameras sensor designers perceptions of various film stocks and image adjustment parameters.
The lab
Laboratory work can also offer a considerable variance in the image produced. By controlling the temperature and varying the duration in which the film is soaked in the development chemicals and by skipping certain chemical processes (or partially skipping them), cinematographers can achieve very different looks from a single film stock in the laboratory.
Filters
Filters, such as diffusion filters or color-effect filters, are also widely used to enhance mood or dramatic effects. Most photographic filters are made up of two pieces of optical glass glued together with some form of image or light manipulation material between the glass. Color filters work by blocking out certain color wavelengths of light from reaching the film. With color film, this works very intuitively wherein a blue filter will cut down on the passage of red, orange and yellow light and create a blue tint on the film. for instance a yellow filter, which cuts down on blue wavelengths of light, can be used to darken a daylight sky (by eliminating blue light from hitting the film, thus greatly underexposing the mostly blue sky), while not biasing most human flesh tone.
Lens
Focal length
The camera does what a human eye does.
Depth of field and focus
Focal length also affects the depth of field of a scene — that is, how much the background, mid-ground and foreground will be rendered in "acceptable focus" (only one exact plane of the image is in precise focus) on the film or video target. 70 mm film has the least depth of field for the same focal length lens than does 35 mm. As videographers try to emulate the look of 35 mm film with digital cameras, this is one issue of frustration - excessive depth of field with digital cameras and using additional optical devices to reduce that depth of field.
In Citizen Kane, cinematographer Gregg Toland used tighter apertures to create very large depth of field in the scenes, often rendering every detail of the foreground and background of the sets in sharp focus.
To change the plane of focus from one object or character to another within a shot is commonly known as a rack focus.
Aspect ratio and framing
Aspect ratio
The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of its width to its height. Many different proprietary photographic systems were invented and utilized in the 1950s to create widescreen movies, but one dominates today: the anamorphic process, which optically squeezes the image to photograph twice the horizontal area to the same size vertical as standard "spherical" lenses.
After the "widescreen wars" of the 1950's, the motion-picture industry settled into 1.85:1 (which is a cropped version of 1.37:1) as a standard for theatrical projection in the United States and the United Kingdom.
In the 1990's, with the advent of high-definition video, television engineers created the 1.78:1 (16:9) ratio as a mathematical compromise between the theatrical standard of 1.85:1 and television's 1.33:1, as it was not physically possible to safely create a television tube with a width of 1.85:1.
Lighting
Most likely the single most important aspect of cinematography is lighting. Light is necessary to create an image exposure on a frame of film or on a digital target (CCD, etc).
Camera movement
One aspect of cinematography that strongly separates it from still photography is the ability to move the camera, which represents the audience's viewpoint or perspective, during the course of filming. This movement plays a considerable role in the emotional language of film images and the audience's emotional reaction to the action on the screen.
Cameras have been mounted to nearly every imaginable form of transportation.
Most cameras can also be handheld, that is the camera operator literally holds the camera in their hands and moves from one position to another while filming the action.
Special effects
The first special effects in the cinema were created while the film was being shot. Later, optical and digital effects were developed so that editors and visual effects artists could more tightly control the process by manipulating the film in post-production.
For examples of many in-camera special effects, see the work of early filmmaker Georges Méliès.
Frame rate selection
Motion picture images are presented to an audience at a constant speed. However, by varying the speed at which the image is captured, various effects can be created knowing that the faster or slower recorded image will be played at a constant speed.
For instance, time-lapse photography is created by exposing an image at an extremely slow rate. If a cinematographer sets a camera to expose one frame every minute for four hours, and then that footage is projected at 24 frames per second, the event that took four fours to record will now take 10 seconds to present (1 frame per minute for 4 hours equals 240 frames, projected at 24 frames per second equals 10 seconds). The inverse of this, if an image is captured at speeds above that at which they will be presented, the effect is to greatly slow down (slow motion) the image. If a cinematographer shoots a person diving into a pool at 96 frames per second, and that image is presented back at 24 frames per second, it will take 4 times as long to watch the dive as it did for it to actually happen.
In motion pictures the manipulation of time and space is a considerable contributing factor to the narrative storytelling tools. Film editing plays a much stronger role in this manipulation, but frame rate selection in the photography of the original action is also a contributing factor to altering time.
Role of the cinematographer
In the film industry, the cinematographer is responsible for the technical aspects of the images (lighting, lens choices, composition, exposure, filtration, film selection), but works closely with the director to ensure that the artistic aesthetics are supporting the director's vision of the story being told.
Directors of photography make many creative and interpretive decisions during the course of their work, from pre-production to post-production, all of which affect the overall feel and look of the motion picture. Many of these decisions are similar to what a photographer needs to note when taking a picture: the cinematographer controls the film choice itself (from a range of available stocks with varying sensitivities to light and color), the selection of lens focal lengths, aperture exposure and focus.
Evolution of technology: new definitions
Traditionally the term "cinematography" referred to working with motion-picture film emulsion, but it is now largely synonymous with videography and digital video due to the popularity of digital cinema.
Modern digital image processing has also made it possible to radically modify pictures from how they were originally captured.
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