A few months ago, I was hanging out the side of an airplane, 3,000 feet above the ground, speeding at almost 150 miles per hour. It’s not my favorite place to be, careening through the sky sticking out of a plane, but I had good reason, and I’d been there before. This time, I was shooting 4K video of an air show pilot flying with us in close formation. The swinging prop of his flying hot rod, clawing the air at roughly 2,500 RPM, was barely more than ten feet from my head. And while I’m glad we had smooth air, this was also just another day at the office.
Michael Goulian / Goulian Aerosports, for Sony from Jeff Berlin on Vimeo.
I was using one of Sony’s new 4K camcorders, and once back on “terra firma” and sitting in front of my Mac, the footage looked amazing. So good in fact, that when I screened some footage on a 4K display, I felt like I could reach into the television and run my hand along the smooth, composite wing. For most of my career, I’ve been a still photographer, specializing in celebrity portraits, fashion, beauty, aviation and rodeo. But in the past couple years, I’ve also transitioned to moving pictures, and last autumn was DP on my first low-budget indie feature, which I shot in 4K RAW on the Sony F55 CineAlta.
When I delivered the final short film to the air show pilot, I also sent him a few beautiful still shots that I rendered from the footage. These still frames looked as good as any shot from a professional DSLR, but with slightly greater depth of field owing to the camera’s small sensor and ENG-style design. Still, it got me thinking. I now wanted to shoot a fashion or beauty story with a motion picture camera, with the specific intent of pulling only stills. But I didn’t want to do this with the FDR-AX1, the camcorder with which I shot the airplane project. No, I wanted to shoot next with the large-sensor Sony F55 in 4K RAW, and capitalize on the quality of image inherent to that format, i.e. dynamic range and exposure latitude, bit depth and color space – S-gamut and S-Log2, shallow depth of field, etc…
4K Still Image from a SONY FDR-AX1
As we know, 4K resolution for the Sony F55 is 4096 x 2160. When I compared this to the resolution of my 10 megapixel Leica D-LUX 3, 4224 x 2376, I thought this would likely be enough resolution to pull stills of sufficient quality to run in magazines, especially with a little goosing in Photoshop. I also found the idea of shooting at 24 frames per second really interesting. Talk about capturing that decisive moment. It was like I would be shooting with a superfast, continuous motor drive. Indeed, the motor drive on my fastest camera, the Sony a77 DSLR, maxes out at a speedy 12 FPS, which isn’t too shabby for a DSLR. Thing is, one doesn’t just mash down the shutter button and spray away. That 12 FPS is a burst speed due to buffer size and write speed limitations. I also have been shooting long enough to remember when I loaded my cameras with film, by the roll or sheet. So even with my transition to digital, and now shooting to cards with hundreds or thousands of available exposures, I still consider each exposure and shoot very deliberately, never just spraying and praying, as some call it.
Lately, more and more of my clients are requesting motion content in addition to still photographs. In fact, it’s now rare that a still photo shoot is just a still photo shoot. This convergence of stills and motion for guys like me is relatively new and for many, was ushered in with Canon’s 5DM2 and its ability to shoot both high quality stills and cinematic-style video. This camera was disruptive to the industry and changed the game for us photographers. Nevertheless, as of this writing, DSLR cameras from the big three, Sony, Canon and Nikon all shoot motion at 1920 x 1080, (not including the Canon 1DC), so pulling still frames fit for publication from their video files is not really an option.
The F55 takes this convergence of still and video to the next level, even though it is, really, a dedicated digital motion picture camera. No matter, I’ve found it allows me to not only shoot the highest quality 4K footage, but it allows me to then pull stills of sufficient resolution, directly from the video files, that I could then publish in a magazine. This isn’t possible with any DSLR. You might be thinking, but wait, the resolution of the F55’s sensor equates to only about 10 MP, apples to apples. Perhaps, but a few years back when I was still shooting Kodak film for work, my only digital camera was the small Leica point and shoot mentioned above. It wasn’t unusual for me, though, to submit files from that camera to magazines. And not once did I receive a complaint; they reproduced onto the printed page just fine.
So with that established, I needed to get down to the nuts and bolts of this experiment, so I organized a camera test with the F55 to photograph a model from LA Models. I also did some research on the inter-webs before my shoot, and spoke to some friends, and learned that what I’m doing is called cinephotography and it’s a thing. It seems a handful of photographers have used various models of digital cinema cameras to capture still images, or have rendered stills for print use from the footage they were generating for commercials and other projects.
Since I also was booked to shoot a fashion story for a magazine here in L.A., I thought it would be cool to use the F55 for that also. So one sunny Monday afternoon at my loft in Downtown Los Angeles, I fired up the F55 with the sole intent of pulling still frames. Naturally, I shot in 4K RAW for all the aforementioned benefits that shooting RAW affords. During my transition from DSLR to shooting with a full-fledged cinema camera like the F55, shooting in RAW was one of the most directly translatable and easy-to-understand, concepts. I also wanted to limit motion blur and capture clear, defined images as I directed my model, Carly, through a series of attitudes, movements and poses. A 180 degree shutter I decided, wouldn’t cut it so instead, I dialed in a 45 degree shutter, which would equate to 1/200th of a second in relation to my 24 FPS frame rate. That shutter angle would be fast enough to limit blur, yet still slow enough to show a bit of motion in moving hair.
With the new firmware update, version 3.0, the F55 is no longer locked at an exposure index of 1,250 ISO when shooting RAW. Nevertheless, 1,250 is the sensor’s native ISO and affords me an ideal exposure latitude and dynamic range for shooting in my sun-drenched loft. To that end, the F55’s two internal ND filters also came in handy, and once dialed in, allowed me to open up to somewhere between wide open and f2.8 on the 85mm T2 Sony PL-mount lens. I also set the monitor LUT to Rec.709 Type A, which is also new to firmware version 3 and seems pretty good for skin tones and saturation. Zebra at 70% and white focus peaking selected, I was ready to go.
As I was rolling on Carly, and directing her to give me the expressions and body positions I was looking for, I remained mindful to shoot quick; so to speak, since I was clocking data to the F55’s AXS memory card at about 1 Gigabit per second. With my experience last autumn shooting the feature on the F55, I was not at all concerned about workflow and file sizes while shooting RAW, and I knew I had a Mac with enough horsepower to review, grade and render the selects. Still, I wanted to shoot concisely and only ever told my model to hold for a second or three when I knew she hit a sweet spot.
Film in the can, I dumped the card onto my USB 3.0 RAID and opened the files for review in Sony RAW Viewer, available free for Mac and PC. As I scrubbed through shots and combed frame by frame through select sequences, I started to feel that there’s a fine balance between the ability to capture the perfect moment, over and over at 24 FPS, and overkill. I think the key is to not overshoot — to keep your model moving and, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, to pause ever so slightly at those key moments to ensure you got “the shot.” All in all, on my camera test with Carly I shot a total of 178 GB of footage.
Once I made my selects, I gave them a quick grade in Sony’s RAW Viewer software, fiddling with density, color, contrast and other variables to give me a good start on my final image.I then marked each single frame as both “in” and “out” point and processed them as DPX files. Each DPX file sized out to just over 53 MB and is recognized by, and opens right up in, Adobe Photoshop. After a proper retouch, I’ll save a TIFF as my final for submission to the client and a smaller JPEG for social media and other use. I’ll also save a graded version of the DPX to file as my digital negative of sorts. Photoshop saves DPX as Cineon files.
This motion to stills workflow was very similar in steps to the process I normally use for post on a photo job. In that instance, I import the RAW files from my Sony a7R into my Mac, edit and grade the RAW image files in a program called Capture One by Phase One, and then render those files to high resolution TIFFs for further refinement and retouching in Photoshop. Satisfied with the results from my camera test with Carly, I again a few days later fired up the F55 at the Mack Sennett Studios in Silver Lake, a hipster enclave a stone’s throw from Downtown. The studio has its roots in Old Hollywood and the silent film era and dates back to 1916; it’s where they shot The Keystone Cops.
Now shooting with a larger crew of editors, hair and makeup, clothing stylists and assorted assistants buzzing about, there was a lot more activity than during the camera test a few days before. I also built up the camera with a full complement of accessories… OLED viewfinder, Sony’s 7 inch Full HD monitor, and compliments of Digital Film Studios, a terrific production facility near Burbank, follow focus, matte box and a sturdy camera support. Beyond that I also connected to the F55 an Atomos Samurai Blade monitor / recorder / playback deck. Since the magazine also likes to run behind-the-scenes short films of their shoots, the footage from the Samurai Blade, taken from my exact shooting perspective, would integrate perfectly with the BTS footage one of my assistants was capturing on a DSLR.
One thing that became more top of mind when working with my model on this fashion shoot was that when the camera is rolling, unlike when I’m shooting with my stills cameras, there is no click of the shutter. My model direction, I found, had to be continuous and even more specific than it usually is. Many models rely on the click of the shutter for everything from affirmation to pace and momentum. Without the feedback of that click, I was in a constant monologue with my girl and I could see, for her, it was an adjustment that took a short while.
Lastly, since these images were for a client, besides shooting with the F55 that day, I backed myself up with my a7R as insurance. During these tests I found that shooting full-figure fashion on a cinema camera, as opposed to shooting beauty or a portrait, is still, even at 10 MP, pushing the lower boundary of what I’m willing to accept and submit to a magazine. With the horizontal orientation of the camera, the model is just too small a part of the frame to crop in and pull a still with the resolution and detail that I need. And yet as I say this, I just received an email from the magazine with the Creative Director’s selects for the layout. As I scroll through the pages, I see it — page six, my coltish thoroughbred model, Wylie Hays of Next Models, seated on an apple box, demure and confident, a long white coat draped over her shoulder. It is without doubt the best frame from that outfit. It’s my first choice. And it was shot on the F55. It is, I dare say, a perfect moment.
I’m looking forward to shooting more often with the F55 with the specific intent of pulling stills. For beauty and portraits where the subject fills much more sensor and screen real estate, the resolution and quality is more than enough to pull high quality stills. And it’s great to be able to capture the exact moment, the exact angle, the exact expression, the perfect frame… though too many good shots might also complicate selecting a final image. At any rate, I see cinephotography becoming more popular and another option for photographers seeking to take the convergence of stills and motion to the next level, for the technology is finally here.
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