i caught a moment that i can only describe as miraculous. incidentally in this shot this person and their dog were walking up this hill completely alone, i started with a much wider shot and then saw them right as they were about to crest it and zoomed in. of all the footage i got yesterday this one's probably the most magical, the most fundamentally *cinematic* image

images!!!

hooohghh i love texture

also everyone's hot on chromatic aberration these days but they use plugins and they go straight for red-blue. bitch i use a 70s tv lens and i lean into that green-pink aberration!

what's fun about working with a blackmagic camera is there's just SO much information crammed into these ugly flat color profile images. look at what the above looks like before color correction!

for a lot of this gasworks footage i've been leaning really hard into almost surreal levels of saturation. i think it emphasizes all the best qualities of this lens. the second image is a more realistic color grade and it just isn't as chewy to me! i don't use vintage lenses for their verisimilitude

here's another before/after example. coloring this shoot i'm drawn to excessive saturation, maybe it's the fact that this is a video lens meant for 16mm film. there's so many glass elements coated in so many chemicals you'd be NUTS not to lean into it!

we fetishize camera resolution and lens sharpness and using post-processing to achieve a vintage look, as if you can't get something infinitely more authentic by just using a shitty lens and embracing the necessity of imperfection in art

i feel like modern digital cinematography on the whole is really terrified of high-contrast images. which i'd at least understand if they were worried about banding in the darkest darks on hdr tvs, but they shoot in dark rooms and make even the lightest lights look like shadows!

images feel so much DYNAMIC when you're willing to make a choice to be contrasty on both ends. i don't even know if this is what i would call a final grade, but it's got some gas imo.

i think the modern professional cinematography ethos of capturing all the raw information you can on the day and then choosing what to throw away in post, while useful in many contexts, lends itself to an artistic wishy-washy-ness. at a certain point you gotta be willing to make a choice, and when push comes to shove i think it's usually better to start with imperfect equipment than it is to start perfect and carve away towards imperfection

anyway i've discovered to my absolute shock that resolve's camera stabilization software plays REALLY NICE with my camera in a way i absolutely was not expecting, making this footage ten thousand times more usable than i ever expected

davinci resolve is a weird program to get a handle on at first but once you do, oh man, it's astonishing what you can do with it considering it's FREE. and while there are a lot of effects hidden behind a paywall, the stock effects have more than covered most of the bases i've looked for, and anyway you can import effects from the internet of which there are quite a few

@sarahzedig my dumb fuck video game brain saw that furst image and immediately thought "wow, the FOX engine still looks incredible"

@turntechcatfish @sarahzedig i was about to post this akfjdjs

@sarahzedig it's wild to me how much this looks almost like a painting? big georges seurat vibes

@sarahzedig god every picture of the PNW i see fills me with emotions i can't describe. and i've never even been there i'm from the midwest!