Notes on Cameras for Photography

Practical Photojournalism by Martin Keane

·         Visible light 400 nm to 7860 nm

·         P3 when rays of light diverging from a point fall on a lens they are focused oo produce an image

·         The distance from the lens to the plane in which parallel light is brought into focus is known as the focus length of the lens

·         The greater the focal length the larger the size of objects in the image created

·         P6 A lens needs to be moved relative to the image plane to compensate for changes in distance between it and the subject

·         P7 lenses using internal focusing are sometimes designated IF

·         Aperture is the amount of light that a lens will pass

·         Settings of aperture are conventionally: 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32

·         The smaller the number the greater the amount of light passed by the lens

·         Each setting passes half the light of the next setting numerically smaller than it

·         P8 a reduction in the physical size of the aperture when taking the picture i.e choosing a bigger number (stopping down) will mean less light coming through the lens which has to compensated by longer exposure (more camera shake) or etc… it also increases the depth of field

·         Focal length divided by its effective diameter

·         As shutter speeds vary by a factor of 2

·         To pass twice as much light, the diameter of the lens has to be increased, not by a factor of 2, but by a factor of the square root of 2 (=approx. 1.4)

Camera Terms

Basic Studio Directing

Basic Studio Directing by Rod Fairweather, Focal Press, Oxford, 1998

• p12 ‘shouting gets in the way of useful talkback’
• p14 ‘producer and director must work as a team’ - technical teams must follow the director
• ‘on air time and exact duration’ p18
• p24 Focal length ‘If parallel light is shone into a lens the distance to the point of focus behind a lens is its focal length
• fnumbers: we use an iris (a variable size hole) in  lens to control the amount of light let through
• the more we open the iris the smaller the f number
• each stop lets in twice as much light as the previous field
• Semi profile shot, 2 shot
• looking room, head room, not centre framing, balancing shots
• non-horizontal lines
• inexperienced directors have nothing in foreground whilst crabbing
• p100 ‘slowly zooming can be highly effective’
• can be visually dull without reaction shots

The Politics of American Media

Booker, K., From Box Office to Ballot Box: The American Political Film Account

• p160 ‘tendency in the american national pysche towards violent and hatred of the other’
• Americans as ‘saviours of the vietnamese people’
• The Green Beret ‘depicts the war in Vietnam as a simple, good vs evil struggle of good guy Americans against bad-guy Americans’
• p161 ‘Films made after the end of the war had come to grips with the fact that this American victory did not occur’
• ‘most American films had… glorified war’

Dimaggio, A. When Media Goes to War: Hegemonic Discourse, public opinion and the limits of dissent

• p12 New York Times committed to “ democracy protection”
• p165 ‘opposition to the United States is common in the Muslim world’
• p166 ‘ the field of media stdies focuses too heavily on the United States and Europe
• p168 ‘ corporate media ownership is inherently undemocratic
• p171 ‘western corporations are assaulting the cultural autonomy of poorer states

Kellner, D.,  Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan*(http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)

• p1 ‘the rise and decline of 60s radicalism, the failure of liberalism, and the rise of the New Right in the 1970s; and the triumph and hegemony of the right in the 1980s’
• 1960s ‘film transcoded the discourse of the anti war, new left students’
• “New Hollywood” eg Bonnie and Clyde
• ‘Hollywood film, like U.S Society, should be seen as a contested terrain… struggle of representation over how to construct a social world and everyday life’
• Conservative films: star wars, rocky, superman, close encounters of the third kind

Kellner D., Media Spectacle http://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/MEDIA118/celebrity+culture/Book_media+spectacle_douglas+kellner.pdf

• p vii ‘Media culture excels in creating Megaspectacles of sporting events, world conflicts, entertainement breaking news,’
• p3 ‘capitalist society seperates ’art from life’

Orientalism

from the book Orientalism by E., Said, 1979, NY, Random House

• pxxviii 'herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like 'America' or 'Islam' and invent collective identitiesfor large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse
• p1' a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes and remarkable experiences
• 'Americans will not feel the same about the orient' - more association with China and Japan
• 'The orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and more recurring images of the Other'
• p94 'a realtion between Western writing (and its consequences) and Oriental silence the result of and the sign of the West's great cultural strength, its will to power over the Orient'
• p95 'Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient'

Camera movement

• Pull back retraction
• pull back reveal
• open up - revealing additional info
• close out eg Rebecca, blood diamond
• draw in
• draw out - start of close, out to wide, character remain in relation to each other
• spin around
• fly over
• depth dolly
• dolly up, dolly down
• spin look eg tombstone, after hours
• track through solid
• vertigo/dolly zoom
• expand dolly - actor moves faster than camera
• contract dolly
• collapse dolly - actor overtakes camera

Crane Techniques

Crane Up, move away
Crane down, move towards

Searching cranes - character searches, crane away reveals magnitude of search

Rise up - looking over an obstruction

Fall Down - look at something on the ground

Crane front to top - from full on to overhead

Crane up entrance

Crane up expression - emotional response - pyschological detachment, nature of life

Crane up look down

Crane down, look up - from full on to below