HockeyFan12

I haven't shot with the Ursa Mini Pro, but the footage I've seen from it and the projects I've worked on that were shot with it have looked really good. Like, really good. And people who own it love it. I think the MX is cool and a real breakthrough, but I find Red's workflow demanding and it's OLD. The sensor itself is about a half generation behind the original C300 and to my eye the image isn't that much better... It's also really noisy under tungsten light, but everyone shoots daylight balanced these days anyway, or they tend to. But other cameras handle 3200K better. Red's current stuff is another story, of course, but so is the cost. The MX also needs a lot of light to look good. While I agree with everyone who's suggesting that you either rent an Alexa or buy a dSLR instead, this is your hobby and the last thing you need is people telling you what you'll enjoy. If you want to own the camera and shoot 4k, own the camera and shoot 4k.

Looks good. Tbh I think you could get the same effect in 2d just with black solids and screening the speculars back in. But of course for the whites of the eyes that would be trickier–any highlights over those would be harder to extract. Anyhow, no arguing with how that looks, it looks good.

Can't argue with that. Just figured something simple might be easier. Was it Dr Who by any chance?

While I like cool workflows, I think you're overthinking it. While that could be a good opportunity to play around with 3D, all you need to do is roto in black for the eyes and screen (or track) the extant catch lights back on. Or at most just use CC sphere in After Effects if you want some texture to the eye instead of pure black.

You can roto the eyes out (quickly in mocha) and luma key/screen the catch lights back on, which is even easier if you have strong catch lights in the first place.

Those images look amazing. I think all that tech really is is marketing speak for much thicker bayer filter array color filters on a standard sensor, filters designed to accept a much narrower part of the spectrum. Current BFA filters are broadband in order to improve low light ability (more light hitting the chip) and then there's a lot of crazy math done to attempt to compensate for the overlapping color information. These look narrow, like Velvia. I talked with a company (that makes notch color filters for color blind people) about producing a sample notch filter for use for stills and video. Basically a super strong ND filter that blocks selectively the colors where BFA filters overlap. It wouldn't provide "accurate" color, but it would provide dramatically more vivid color. Unfortunately my talks went nowhere. Someone could do this. It would take a lot of work and some money, but producing a "vivid color nd" (while not as good as the above product) could be viable.

I LOVE Channel 101, especially the pre-YouTube stuff. What's kind of shocking to me is that the writing is fantastic and you had Jack Black (a major celebrity then) and lots and lots of major celebrities now (who were less famous then) and yet the view count of most of that stuff on YouTube is surprisingly low. It speaks again to knowing your audience, I guess? Granted, it's also not current material, but neither are all viral videos current. And to that extent that you need to know your audience, I don't think much of the stuff here would impress anyone there. Sure, production values are better on this site, but the writing on that site (at least among the better submissions) is just incredible. So good that many of those writers are now the most innovative voices in comedy. The production values are adequate, too. Good enough to get the story across. Bad acting, sure, but the good kind of bad acting where people are embarrassing themselves in the service of the story. There's sort of a braveness to that that comes across as good in its own way. I do think some stories and some ideas require better production value than others. But if yours don't... that's a blessing.

Thanks, @Jimbo and I agree with the approach you're taking. Wish I had more discipline, myself. The constant behind success seems to be focus. Ideally on the right thing! Which is why I need to figure out what I want in the first place. :/ @kaylee, I’m not signed anywhere for anything so I don’t have a clue. If anything, Tim’s advice (which rings true) is probably the best here. But I have a number of friends and friends of friends signed to major agencies. You need to look at it in terms of supply and demand. Maybe you have the commodity they want, maybe you don’t. If you do, they’ll sign you. It sounds to me like agency connections are the commodity you want, which isn’t necessarily a great start. Talent agencies have access to production value. They can put together a feature. What they need is a vision… at least an idea. Maybe it’s visual (say what you will about Michael Bay, but that guy can shoot) or emotional (Spielberg) or conceptual (Dan Harmon or Charlie Kaufman). Maybe you're just a competent director, or writer, or good looking actor. They can use that. They’ll provide the rest. If you're signed on something visionary, they’re basically going to ask you to remake your good idea with good production value. Your first gig after you’re signed will be essentially remaking whatever got you signed–this time with proper production value. It's not for everyone. Most people I know who get signed hate it. But a lot of what we’re focusing on at this site is how to get that production value without an agency behind us. And we have to ask ourselves why isn’t anyone funding our idea if it’s so great. And we also need to ask ourselves, if our idea is so good, why does it need all that production value just to get noticed. If you can answer this question–and maybe your idea really is legitimately ahead of its time or so personal or crazy you can only express it on your own and you need to make it to even express its potential–then focus on that aspect of it which makes it so good and yet so unfamiliar, exciting (to you), and new. As David Lynch would say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4468dVu_PaM The donut, ideally, is what got you into this field in the first place! Anyhow, maybe I’m just writing myself a pep talk. But don’t focus on all the things you know can go wrong (still use your knowledge constructively or you might get in over your head) or all the tangential interests or gear you want to involve unless you’re exploring a new technique relating to certain gear specifically, and if you are, just focus on that one technique. (Like a stunning low light video or hyper lapse or motion control video.) Don’t add technical complications unless they’re crucial to the concept (but, like, get good sound and decent performances). Peter Jackson talks about how he wouldn’t have even made the films he first made if he knew what he knows now about filmmaking. He’d be too worried about what goes wrong (the hole) instead of what he wants to say (the donut). Spielberg seems to direct worse the more closely involved he is as a producer, or the more his financial obligations as a producer escalate. Even those guys don’t need those voices in their head. So get your other voices out of your head. You don’t have to impress every audience. What people on this forum want is not always gonna be what talent agencies want. Pleasing a given audience is a worthy goal. But pleasing every audience is going to put your work in a narrow cross-section or reduce it to lowest common denominator. Maybe it fits. There’s populist stuff that’s amazing. But if your vision is more peculiar maybe choose your audience as narrowly. David Lynch himself doesn't have a big audience relative to his fame, but his fearlessness lends to his cult status within that audience. Or if you just want to get signed or get into a festival for the sake of accomplishment or career then watch exactly what they’re producing or accepting and emulate it better and better and network harder and harder every year. This can work. If you're submitting to a festival without attending it first or watching a large portion of its prior programming it's like asking someone out without having a conversation first. Whether you get rejected or not, it's gonna probably end up weird. I don’t think that scene is for me anyway. Too shy. :/ Fwiw I've seen that web series thing work. I think there were four episodes. They were good! Made for pretty cheap, I think. And weird. Lastly, I saw a YouTube video where a successful writer mentioned that just because you have one grand idea doesn't mean you need to tell that story first. As much as focus matters, it needn't be on your magnum opus. Even if that opus is your donut of donut, maybe there are some good donut holes (not the figurative hole, but a figurative donut piece carved from the... never mind). Maybe take some other simpler ideas to start with and just have fun with those first. Plus, Gall's Law and all. Keep it simple to start.

Nice! This looks about right to me. Makes me wish I lived somewhere more scenic, too!

I guess I can't relate to the genius part, but otherwise I know what you mean. Fwiw, a no budget short can get attention. I've seen it happen. Little projects that are very modest by this site's standards getting people signed to CAA, etc. and resulting in seven-figure feature deals almost immediately. I've been very interested lately in what online communities in past years have birthed significant mainstream talents. YouTube has launched a host of actors but fewer filmmakers (which makes sense given the platform). Vimeo has launched a few filmmaking careers, but even fewer than it seems. Vimeo is sort of the new festival scene: very cool to be part of and show off on, but deceptively hard to leverage toward getting in somewhere lucrative unless you're already in somewhere lucrative through other means and just need to manufacture visibility. But with YouTube, by the time you're Markliplier or Pewdiepie, by the time you're being begged to produce your own show you're already making millions a year... and you can get to be those guys organically. YouTube is the stronger platform. By far. For in front of the camera talent, not directors, though. :/ Where do directors go to shine? I haven't seen a lot of new talent emerging from Reduser, etc. though there are some established all stars there already and great discourse. Communities that existed earlier than that are very interesting, though. A lot of directing talent emerged from dvxuser, though many of the users there were behind handles and didn't publicize their success so much once they went mainstream or their connection to that site was since forgotten. But a number of very slick visual filmmakers started there. Not slick by this site's standards, but hey, they were shooting on minidv. Super talented people. The other community that launched a ton of talent is Channel101. They were big on dvx100s, too, but the production values there are poor by comparison. Intentionally so. But the writing is GREAT on that site. Better than on most commercial content. A lot of incredibly talented writers and comedians started their careers there with content that was messy and cheap but brilliantly written and conceived and with amazing storytelling. Of any community, that was the most impactful. None of these talents started rich. What does this say? That if you have all the money in the world it doesn't help unless you can create something great. So if you have a great eye or are a great writer, pretty soon someone with all the money in the world will hire you! It also says that storytelling is the most important talent of all, but technical skill is useful, too. And if you're rich, hire the best of both, collaborate. It's the tried and true method... Which gets down the bigger point: both of those communities started around narrow goals: make something that looks good or make something that's funny. Commercial content is usually made by people with unbelievably narrow aptitudes. Like, someone who just shades fur but who shades fur REALLY well. Or someone who edits a certain kind of scene in a narrow subset of a genre. A guy who lights cars. But REALLY freaking well. Even the hottest directors are those with known and inimitable styles. And they're all working together in a slow, inefficient, but highly effectively system nonetheless that combines all their talents into something greater than the sum of their parts (ideally). That's why people get signed to CAA for their short films: either they show they can do something no one else can do or that they can mimic what someone else can do that there's a supply for. That's it. Again, narrow skill sets. Used to create a bigger product. This site doesn't cater to that kind of person. This is a site for people who want to know how to do it all. And do it all for cheap. This site is for punks. For rebels. And no surprise it's harder to launch a brilliant career on that, even if "that" includes a skill-set encompassing many potentially lucrative careers, if narrowly applied. So the question is, why do we think this way? Why are we thinking with so many brains when all we need is one good one? Broad as our interests get, they always begin with one dream. One thing we want to communicate. One idea that would be impossible to realize due to money, due to narrow-minded investors, due to how slowly commercial sets run, due to how big or slow older cameras are or how outmoded productions technique can be. Conventional wisdom says it's impossible. But we're still dead set on learning how to make it possible. So we learn and learn and learn. We post here. Read here. Post elsewhere. Read elsewhere. Absorb tech. Absorb culture. See where they meet. We're the Steve Jobses (or Kanye Wests), seeing where technology and culture are heading and where they intersect and ignite. We see the big picture no one else sees. But we're also very cursed. Cursed because we can only show other people what we see by painting it ourselves. And yet we're getting caught up squabbling over which brush to use. This site is where we explore our interests, sure. But it's those interests that brought us here in the first place. They don't emerge from this community. You know what you need to do now because you knew before. That's the problem with resources like this: passions trickle down into tangential debate. That original passion is diverted into tribal politics, when we should just be taking information as information and opinion as opinion. You like a GH4, I like a C300. Our opinions vary and so do the goals that led us to be so passionate about such silly things as that. We didn't get started because we liked GH4s or C300s. We got started because we had big, brilliant, original goals. And those goals aren't silly. What if Steve Jobs got stuck on a messageboard debating what brand of a certain component to use in the Macintosh instead of making the Macintosh? There are hundreds of thousands of GH4 users out there (I'm guessing). There's only one you. And you picked the camera up because you wanted to do something with it. It's not about the camera. It's about you. This website brings people together but it distracts us from what brought us here in the first place. Its strength is the talent and motivation of its members; its weakness is that same passion being wasted on bickering and self-doubt. There's a wealth of information, and we came for that. Let's take it and leave the rest behind. The other brains. The other voices. In moments like these I think we need to ask ourselves: what, exactly, do you want to do? Why did you get into this field in the first place? What do you need to know in order to do it. Find out. Then do it.

Your lens is failing you, for one. Did you shoot this wide open? I wouldn't expect a huge difference between the two cameras but try a better lens, ideally a high end prime, stopped down to f5.6 on the Sigma, and the performance should match the Samsung at least. The 17-50 isn't exactly good wide open. That said, maybe it's more than that? That comparison's not even close. The middle bush with the variety of leaf colors should be where the Sigma pulls ahead and it's totally failing there.

I just wanted to add that if you expose cameras like the C300 and F5 with an incident meter at their given ISOs (850 and 2000, respectively) the image is a lot darker than most of what we see online (ungraded sample footage, that is). Given your profile picture, I assume you're using an incident meter, but I think people have gone a little too crazy with ETTR and not using a meter and that's responsible for some of the "video look" stuff you get, particularly with cameras that struggle with chroma clipping. (Weirdly, I see DPs underexposing the Alexa all the time, and it's the one camera that has its saturation vs IRE curve just about perfect. I think I just see a lot of bad exposures!) I do think the F5 looks terrible exposed at 2000 ISO, though. :/ And haven't used the GH5 but the GH4 seems to respond to over and underexposure better than Sonys at least.

Those look great. I loved shooting 135 and 6x7 but large format was too expensive for me. Maybe start processing and scanning yourself? It'll slow you down more and save you money, too. The Nikon 5000 is seriously good. I used to own one and it has driver issues but once you solve them it and the Nikon 9000 scanners are spectacular. But very slow... I wouldn't get a flatbed scanner for 135. Or try underexposing on the D80? It's not a bad camera I just don't think it's quite what you're looking for. Maybe save the money for more film. If I shot people I would shoot on a Leica Rangefinder, no question. Tiny, sharp, and no thunk or heavy shutter so with good technique you can use lower shutter speeds. I love rangefinders and 135 has great texture, looks more organic than larger formats. But I'm not really interested in stills these days. If I were I'd shoot film probably.

I really liked the tonality of the D70 (at the expense of very grainy shadows), but if you're looking for a clean highlight roll off, I'm not sure that's the camera, either. I did like the look of it. Less digital looking than the 20D and subsequent Nikon and Canon cameras... but noisier. I remember the highlights clipping just like with any other digital sensor, though. I think you might be stuck with film tbh. But there are worse things than that.

That's fair. Definitely not a kind of photography I do a lot of. When I dabbled in it I used a Leica rangefinder and would focus through the rangefinder rather than setting hyperfocal distance and compose through the rangefinder. But I decided it wasn't for me. In retrospect, maybe my slow ability to focus hurt. Hyperfocal technique is more instantaneous. @mercer I'm not that into photography but I found the 5D Mark III to be a solid stills camera when I had one. Yes, the Sigma has better image quality at 100 ISO and it's small. Bt that's IT. Everything else about it is much worse. Like crazy worse. And it also has this magenta/green noise that needs to be filtered out in lab color space and sometimes can't be so you really have to be careful. The battery life is awful and shot-to-shot time is the worst I've experienced. If I cared much about photography I'd buy an old MFDB and tech camera lenses.Bbut I don't, and this is the next best thing. If you want it for one thing (hyperfocal street photography, or I'm trying to get into some really abstract stuff–the shots I posted were test images to see how the detail is) it's great for the money. I wouldn't start with one. If you really want to challenge yourself, I'd get a spot meter and shoot slides on an old (like 1960s) SLR without a working on-camera meter. That's how I learned to expose. In the lab, they can change the exposure on C41 when they print it and it has tons more dynamic range. If you want to get really good at photography and exposure (not of people, necessarily, because they move too fast) pick up a manual focus Nikon camera and use an external light meter. Or challenge yourself a bit less and get an old Nikon SLR (the FM2 is great) and use TTL metering. For small stills cameras, the Fujis are really nice.

Very nice shots. I still don't see the Sigma as a great street photography camera (your focusing/composition method is the same as you'd use with large format, requiring a lot of light and knowledge of hyperlocal distances, and again I wouldn't rate it past 100 ISO). But those look great. Great eye. And I do think the highlight roll off is a lot closer to slide film than you'd get on other digital cameras. Both in your photos, and just in my experience. But it doesn't look like color negative, which is softer in the highlights than slide film or digital. I REALLY don't think these are the right cameras for Ed, especially when I find film to be so good for photographing people. And frankly I find color negative better in both low light and mixed lighting... also in difficult lighting... than anything digital. (I'd recommend he check out a Mamiya 7, but 6x7 is far slower than 135 for low light.) I think where the Sigmas do shine is in rendering difficult textures. The photos I posted are not very good, sort of test shots, but if you download them and zoom in to 100% you can see that difficult textures are rendered better than you'd expect from an APS-C camera, let alone a tiny point and shoot. I think a D800 and excellent lens could get similar results, but that's expensive and big, and even then I'm not sure.

My bad. Yeah, the DP2 Merrill is slower than a medium format rangefinder but faster than an RZ67 or something. WAY faster than large format. But also way less control. Best texture of anything for its size, though. IMO better than 6x7 film. The magenta/green low frequency noise can be fixed by doing noise reduction in lab color space but it's still a pain. Not a perfect camera. If the DP2 Classic is a lot faster than that, then it might be a decent street photography camera.

I finally got a tripod working so I took some photos. The DP2 Merrill has big problems (the LCD is terrible, shooting photos is so slow... it really is awful for street photography IMO) but the sharpness with difficult textures can't be beat. Blurry grass up front is due to a strong ND filter. These aren't the best photos I took but it illustrates the DP2's strengths best. Unfortunately shadows have serious green/magenta banding at a very low frequency. The camera has a really messy rendering up close, too, not quite aliasing but just odd banding sort of. But the detail on these is great imo. Even higher megapixel Bayer sensors will suffer a lot under similar circumstances. ButI wouldn't dare rate it faster than 100 ISO.

Thanks for those references, Ed. Deakins is amazing and his forum is incredible. I look forward to checking out the other links. Also if what I wrote above wasn't clear or is too verbose, the basics of what Elswit is doing is setting up the key and fill near each other, so that the fill (soft source) carries a 3/4 backlight or backlight key onto people's faces, etc. This creates a look with tons of contrast, but you still get beauty light on faces and you get eye lights so that eyes read. He's creating sort of a gradient of light starting with an intense hard single source key and then feathering it into softer light sources as it wraps around the subject just enough to illuminate faces. Super cool and practical to do. The basics of what Abraham is doing is turning off all lights behind the camera so that whatever sources you do have (be they practical or lights on a stage) are working as part of an effective large backlight/offside key schema. He approaches day exteriors the same way, only there he's moving the subjects relative to the lights (including rotating the talent during their CUs) rather than moving the light relative to the subject. Obviously other techniques work. It's not like an on-side key is the worst thing in the world. But these are simple approaches to get a good look, even on a budget.

Eep, I’m not sure exactly what to write. A lot of this is on a case-by-case basis. A few things I’ve found useful for corporate work are: When shooting talking heads, light primarily with an offside 3/4 book light close to camera that serves as both eye light and key and then put some negative fill on the other side of the face just off-camera. That way you can get both soft light and contrast and dial in any skin correction in post or with a promist filter. If you do choose to use a fill light (a hair light, diffused of course, could also help) keep it very soft and from camera direction, not 180º away from the key, to maintain shape. Keep both lights approximately at camera height to avoid raccoon eyes. Overlighting is fine... if you're then removing light–doing the HMI through every window thing or Kino Flo in every corner and then turning off or dimming anything that’s behind the camera so you’re always working with a backlit scene or an offside key. I spoke extensively with Phil Abraham about how he lit the Sopranos and the approach to many interiors was rather DIY. On sets they had huge banks of dozens if not hundreds of 60w incandescent lights above the stage (facing 40º down toward the talent) that functioned as soft backlights and offside keys. Each corner of the room had one pointed toward the middle of the room. Only the lights in front of the camera were turned on. Anything behind the camera was turned off. Of course, there were also practicals and bounce cards for fill. When they turned around, they’d just flip which lights were on and which were off so it was always backlit/side-lit. At least that was the basic approach that was fined tuned with smaller units. That's for the interior sets but you can use the same techniques on locations with high ceilings. You can do the same thing even in a corporate setting even for b roll even when you see the ceilings. Cameras are so sensitive these days and color correction so powerful that lighting with practicals is fine. Say you have a room being lit with overhead fluorescent lights. If you want some shape to the room, just use the switches in the room or flags or trash bags or whatever to turn off or flag off all the lights behind the camera. Then you’ll get the natural light working as a soft offside key. If you want to light talent standing in front of that so that their faces aren't dim, just use the same principles as the book light/negative fill combo (maybe a lone LED heavily diffused and as close to the talent as you can bring it, dimmed down a lot, and then negative fill on the other side just off camera). Bring CTO/CTB and plus and minus green to match the LED to the practical lights. Remember, the softness of the light correlates with its perceived size by the subject. A 4’x4’ light at 4 feet will be as soft as a 1’x1’ light at one foot (though the falloff will be quite different). One good trick to get a DIY book light for interviews is to first take a 1x1 LED panel and diffuse it with a piece of 216. And then gel it to match the color temperature of the space. Set is aside. Then take a c-stand and hang a 4’x4’ piece of diffusion (I like 216 or half grid cloth) and bring that wherever you’d want your book light to be. This will be the front of your “DIY” book light. You can easily hang 4’x4’ diffusion that functions just like a 4’x4’ frame just by keeping cuts of it around rolled up in a trash can or box and then extending the c stand's gobo arm so it's parallel with the floor and raising it up and then hanging the cut of diff from number 2 clamps at the top corners. You’ll have to weigh down the bottom corners with a clamp at each corner, too (number 2 clamps). Then position the LED behind the DIY frame and use barn doors to reduce spill (a true book light would have a tent of flags around it, but that’s slow) and turn it on. Move the light until the LED is just far enough to evenly illuminate the 4’x4’ frame. Then dim the LED to adjust brightness. Quick and easy book light and you can store that all in a small car. Don’t be afraid to use flags and nets. If you’re using soft light, just bring flags. You can dim soft light with solid flags and it won't change the shape too much. Buy lights and play with them. Learn on set, but just shoot stuff for fun whenever you want to try a new technique. For narrative, if not storyboarding then at least defining the axis of action clearly can help. As far in advance as possible. Because this will let you place your key light for most of the scene (in theory). My friend who worked with Deakins described his approach as being too time-intensive to replicate on an indie scale, so I won’t bother describing it. One approach he really liked that can be replicated on a small scale is Elswit’s. He would often have a hard key light or back light 3/4 to camera then carry that with a much softer source that blended into it in terms of color temperature and direction, maybe 45º or less rotated toward camera. So he could get a lot of contrast in a scene and always get an exposure on the face by sort of modifying the Ridley Scott Blade Runner look of using a single source, but then sort of softening that source by using it to motived the fill. Filling from key direction, not from the opposite side. (But still tweaking with bounce boards etc. for the close ups). That also lets you do fewer light changes between set ups if you basically only have one direction where the lights are visible and you can’t point the camera. Then you can use a common technique for exteriors and cheat your close ups by rotating the actors rather than moving the lights. This technique is of course great for day exteriors. Shoot with the sun behind you. Rotate actors a bit so the backlight then becomes an offside key for their CUs. You can use bounce cards etc. too. If there’s not too much wind and you’re shooting really close like CU or XCU or something, you can do the c stand trick to hang a weaker diffusion (251 or something) between the subject and the sun to soften the sun light a bit. Or for overcast days, bounce light using a 4x4 bead board silver side (or silver reflector) to create a subtle offside key and use negative fill camera side, for instance, to shape the key further. Or bring a battery-powered LED with you. Scout. Mirror boards are brighter than 18k HMIs. They’re fairly expensive to buy and heavy as hell, but on an indie budget they’re very affordable. Bounce one of those through a window and move it. Maybe put some diffusion against the window. Easy way to get a cheap big gun in day interiors. But you need to time things up so the sun is in the right approximate place. So always scout the sun path for day exteriors and even interiors if you have time. There are apps like Helios that help. That can save you money. But of course if you’re not set on shooting in one direction or the other you can follow the same principles on the fly. I dunno, that’s about it. Also, when in doubt, diffuse your light. Especially lights behind the camera. I like hard light but if I see more than one hard shadow on a wall I know someone screwed up. One hard light is usually enough, but since so few people use hard light these days it can be cool. Oh, and look for darker walls to shoot against. White walls make lighting so much harder.

I guess it's my misunderstanding then. What I mean is that I've noticed a trend toward over-lighting and using power windows to cut the image rather than flags and negative fill. I blame it more on fast schedules and recent trends toward soft light (and an over-reliance on power windows) than on bad DPs... after all, often it's the gaffer, not the DP, designing the set up, and everyone seems to light like this these days so of course they're gonna approach things this way. And to be fair to DPs, if that's the look clients want, it's what they're going to try to get. But I do agree that setting yourself apart from that is a great idea. IMO, if you have an M18 out every window or a soft M90 or Mach Tech on every corner of the room, which is what most people seem to do these days, everything will look pretty good and you can make minimal adjustments, but it will always look a little "flat"and indecisive. Not that it looks bad, just that it looks a little "safe." But to me that's over-lit, not underlit, even if there's a lack of contrast. IMO it's a trend toward "lighting the space" rather than "lighting the frame." I agree with you to the extent that I prefer the 1980s hard light look, artificial as it was. But it was a lot slower and required vastly more preparation. For certain scenarios, though, it's unavoidable. As much as I criticize the approach, sometimes it's easier to blast a space with light than it is to gel every window and approach it more "artistically" and selectively. I have a few techniques I've learned that I think are helpful to avoid this tendency but it's not worth getting into them here. One area I do agree that there's too little lighting is in day exteriors. Contrast the look of Jurassic Park's exteriors to anything today. But I can't say I really miss this style as much. It looks a little cheesy and that was a product of older film stocks lacking shadow detail. I do agree that day exteriors are if anything, often underlit, today. But imo unless your budget is pushing you to move like crazy, it's easier to just schedule around the best light and use negative fill and bounce rather than setting up an 18K HMI or something, plus who can afford that on a small budget? I did work with one DP who just surrounded dialogue scenes during the day with huge diffused HMIs. There was one tucked in every corner, including a 12k. I'm not sure he placed them very carefully but I have to admit it looked great. Sure, it was over-lit, but it worked, and made the faces sort of pop and shine and you got nice catch lights, too.

I haven't noticed this to be the case at all. Most sets I end up with are overlit, if anything. I suppose for some day exteriors this is true, but I'd argue those don't need to be lit.

I've never been a fan of tilt/shift lenses for video. Certainly they're useful for trick photography like in the Social Network (though that was done in post) or as a more elegant solution than a split diopter, but unlike hyalinejim I don't find them useful for video work. It's up to you to decide how useful you find them, of course. When I shot with a view camera or tilt shift lens I would use scheimpflug to get deep focus and use rise and shift to eliminate perspective distortion to make the composition more painterly and eliminate converging lines. But with video the camera inhabits the space and I like to take advantage of that when defining a space, so I emphasize in video what I would have intentionally avoided when shooting stills of architecture. I find very wide angle lenses useful still but I try to compose in depth (foreground, background, subject) by putting objects near the lens that I would normally try to keep away from it in stills and by using camera motion, usually dolly or slider moves, that create the maximum amount of parallax. When photographing moving people or objects, I try to enhance this by moving the camera in the opposite direction from the subject. I can't think of anyone who shoots spaces as well as Michael Bay does. The techniques in this video (the brief montage around 2:50 but throughout) are at odds with traditional architectural photography, but when used more conservatively I think they can allow you to capture depth in a way that defines the space uniquely well: His use of long lenses and almost orthographic projection is a bit less useful for architectural work but equally stunning. I hear good things about the A7RII and Canon adapters if you can afford it. I don't like Magic Lantern for professional use, so if I were you I'd install it on your 5D MK II before buying a 5D MK III specifically for using raw video. I do think it looks nice. But it's so slow and sometimes unreliable. I would try it out first before investing more in that ecosystem. With a GH5 those tilt/shift lenses won't be wide enough imo. Maybe with the XL speed booster, but I would still take a full frame camera over the GH5 if possible.

I think the process is more important than image quality, because the process dictates what kind of image you end up with in the first place. And the mis and composition and exposure and lighting are all going to be more important than film or digital or film stock or megapixel count unless your camera is absolute garbage. These days, few are. But I agree with Ed here. I'm not a fan of LCD screens for photographing people. I admit I never liked film SLRs, either, least of all autofocus SLRs. Hated the F4. I'd prefer an F100 but not by much. I like rangefinders, particularly Leicas. I also liked the Nikon F and FM2. Just because it's so simple and physical. I like film cameras that feel very physical. Process is everything. No one needs to defend the gear they use to anyone except themselves. Well, maybe David Lynch should have thought twice about the PD-150 on Inland Empire. (Is that movie any good? I couldn't get past how bad it looked on a big screen.)

iPhone mostly.