As a child, turning the pages of the family b/w album was the only way to peek into a past I wasn’t witness to. I had turned the pages of that family album often enough to remember the exact sequence of photographs that lay there in. It was an old fraying album, black with faded golden photo corners and floral butter paper separators. Each turn of page was like winding back the very clock of life. There was just one photograph of me as a child making me wish there were more. One day, years later, that album vanished! I was inconsolable…
I grew up to become a maker of images – a cinematographer... I became fascinated by the relationship between photographs and memory. Do I really remember an event as having taken place or do I remember it because of the photograph. And so, are we, like Roland Barthes says, taking photographs in order to forget? Just what IS a photograph? What makes it an image? How does it assume meaning?...I began digging under…
I hold a photograph in my hands. It appears real, tangible and physical. B/w or colour prints on matt paper. The grain showed up best that way, which is what I liked. Grain!... you hardly hear much of that anymore. It’s all about pixels now, megapixels! Nothing that you can hold in your hands, sit across a table and share with someone. Sure, you can share them electronically via email over oceans in seconds, but it’s just not the same anymore. Good thing? Bad thing? Well, it’s all so grey!
While at film school, we shot on 16mm film as well as video. A teaser really to the wonderfully layered world of motion cinematography. Like calligraphy, you can spend a lifetime and still have mastered all but one deft stroke. I slide down the s-curve and into the darkness at the threshold of light (the toe region)…where I just about begin to see. It is all about contrast – from the blackest black to the whitest white…the musical scale of light. Do, you start low…re-mi-fa-so-la n hit the high ti where everything dissolves to eternity!
Contrast is perhaps the most significant feature of an image recorded onto film. It is the variation of densities (shades of grey) that actually form the image. No contrast, no image! The greater the contrast range, the greater is the ability of that system to “see”. In order to understand its significance, let us assume that the eye can see a contrast of 100:1, ie. A hundred steps from white to black. Film (analog) can “see” a contrast ratio of 70:1 and now, high def digital video is slowly nearing that mark. Thus, we begin to appreciate the way film looks – both, motion picture and still camera print film.
The type of emulsion used also determines the sensitivity to light. Films that have a lower sensitivity require longer exposure times (slow speed film) but have a fine grain structure and are less “contrasty”. Larger the grain, greater the sensitivity to light, hence faster film appears grainier and more”contrasty”. As a cinematographer, choosing from the variety of film stock available is as significant as the lens I may choose to shoot a particular scene. After shooting, the processing of the negative and the printing of the positive has an immense bearing on the outcome of the final image.The entire process is fairly time-consuming, laborious and expensive. But the thrill of the unseen, of having experimented with something new is unparalleled. Limitations become challenges, like 36 exposures in a roll of still camera film. Or 400ft of 35mm film will run for about 41/2 mins at 24frames per second. A serious amount of thought goes into the process of image making. But, when complete and projected on to a 70ft by 30ft screen in a darkened cinema hall, the audience entranced, you know it’s all been well worth it.
That unique look has now come to be called the “film look” – rich in tonality, high in detail and contrast range, with a softness so gentle on the eye. It is precisely this “look and feel” that digital camera manufacturers have struggled with since the digital “revolution” exploded two decades ago. I traversed the cusp between film and digital video in the early 1990’s, when I shot a documentary with the “cult” Sony VX1000 mini DV camera. It was small enough to fit in my palm, lightweight and had a cassette that could record an hour of high quality video and stereo audio. But most importantly, it heralded a technology that allowed for video material to be “digitised” into a souped-up home computer and edited like never before – drag n drop with endless possibilities!
The size of the camera changed the very language of shot taking, it also made the image gathering process a lot more discreet, unobtrusive and intimate. Which was just perfect for documentary filmmaking. We stared hard at the all-new learning curve of CCDs, pixels, megabytes, compression and some very strange “digital artefacts”. The film, as the light sensitive medium was replaced by a charge-coupled-device (the chip). Electronics took over from chemistry and the whole process of image making hasn’t been quite the same again. The CCD is at the heart of the digital world we know today. 3-ccd camera vs single chip, the mind boggles.
Light energy is converted to electrical energy in a sequence of voltages proportional to the light intensity; which is then sampled, digitised and stored in some form of memory. But, it is this very chip that frustrated our ambitions by their enormous depth of field due to their tiny size. 2/3rd inch (13.5mm x 10mm) chips compared to a solid 36mm x 24mm film frame of a 35mm film strip.
Depth of field relates to the area in front of and behind the subject that remains in focus when the lens is focussed on the subject. DOF is inversely proportional to format size. For example: a point-and-shoot digital camera with a 1/1.8″ sensor (7.18 mm × 5.32 mm) at a normal focal length and f/2.8 has the same DOF as a 35 mm camera with a normal lens at f/13. Which essentially means an enormous depth of field! Everything is in focus, thus robbing us, cinematographers of our essential tool of guiding the eye of our audience by selective focus.The digital image itself is made up of “pixels”or picture elements. The more pixels used to represent an image, the closer the result can resemble the original. The number of pixels in an image is called the resolution. So that’s where we get 8 megapixel to describe the quality of a digital still camera. And one megapixel is one million pixels! Don’t be seduced or fooled into buying a 10megapixel camera, if all you are going to do is upload your pictures to the net or make 4x6 prints. This table shows the relationship between megapixels and decent quality print size:
Megapixels Print Size (inches)
2.0 4 x 6 [standard]
3.0 5 x 7
4.0 8 x 10
5.0 9 x 12
6.0 11 x 14
8.0 12 x 16
Because what they don’t tell you is that the greater the number of megapixels the more the “noise”. And worse, each image needs a greater amount of storage space. That brings us to compression – a way to store inordinately large amounts of data in relatively small spaces. JPEG, MP4, DivX are some of the commonly used codecs that help in this process. But compression induces “digital artefacts” like colour smears or banding which are totally undesirable.
Today, we have the Red Digital Camera that is capable to capturing and storing images uncompressed at a resolution and quality that rivals film at a fraction of the cost! But is that what it is all about? Can we reduce EVERYTHING to a series of 0’s and 1’s?
We humans are intrinsically not binary and how we navigate our increasingly digital world is of grave importance. German filmmaker Wim Wenders puts it beautifully –“We have learned to trust the photographic image. Can we trust the electronic image? With painting everything was simple. The original was the original, and each copy was a copy - a forgery. With photography and then film that began to get complicated. The original was a negative. Without a print, it did not exist, just the opposite, each copy was the original. But now with the electronic, and next the digital, there is no more negative and no more positive. The very notion of the original is obsolete. Everything is a copy.” Or is it?Story-telling has changed forever. Technology has made filmmaking affordable and DIY which has resulted in an explosion of content creation…a “democratisation” of the filmmaking process. But one thing defines the difference for me – when we shoot on film, we think first and then record only what we definitely want. Now, we record first and then think. Not surprising then that in the year 2007, there were 172 billion images captured worldwide!! At the end of the day, I don’t think it is about technology, it is quite simply our innate desire to take pictures - of ourselves, each other and the world around us. The future is most definitely “digital” with the digital image getting better and almost “film-like”. Of course, we are talking about huge storage requirements, bandwidths and transfer rates. Because, to reach that elusive “film look”, that digital image should not be compressed. Terabytes will casually replace Gigabytes making us forget that 1GB is one thousand MB and that not very long ago 256MB seemed like a lot on our computers.
In fact, computer processing power is only increasing while storage prices are plummeting. The immediate future is most exciting with the circle being completed from both ends with the Red Scarlet – a very high def 3K HD camcorder and the Canon EOS 5D – a “full frame” 21 megapixel digital SLR capable of capturing true HD quality video. Both priced under $3000! Which brings me to believe that soon there will not be a distinction between a still photographer and a cinematographer. Just people doing what they enjoy most – taking pictures and telling their stories without bothering about megapixels, ccds and terabytes!
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