Cinema photography
About cinema photography
Cinema and Photography (B.S.)
If you prefer to see the world through the viewfinder of a camera, you’re going to love being a cinema and photography major. From your first semester, you’ll be deeply involved in planning, shooting, and editing film and still photography projects. At the same time you’ll be learning the theory and history behind your work.
Your introductory courses will teach you to evaluate your work with a deeper understanding of what gives an image impact and meaning. You’ll venture forth from film production classes with a whole new appreciation for the amount of planning and work that goes into a movie long before the cameras start rolling.
By your sophomore year you’ll select a concentration in still photography, cinema production, or screenwriting. If you choose still photography, you’ll embark on an intensive course load that will include classes in color photography, digital photography, contemporary photographic issues, and American visual culture. If you’re interested in cinema production, you’ll take such courses as film theory, screenwriting, and directing. In addition to cinema studies, our new interdisciplinary screenwriting concentration features courses in theater, literature, and writing from the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Whatever your choices, we have the equipment and the facilities to help you get excellent results. Students supply their own 35 mm single-lens reflex camera and light meter, but we provide everything from color and black-and-white darkrooms, digital editing suites, and two digital still-imaging labs to Aaton and Bolex cameras, digital and analog tape recorders, and three film and video studios.
We’ve developed lots of opportunities for you to try out your new skills. Our Los Angeles program arranges internships at film studios, providing real-life experience and contacts that will help you after graduation. The local daily newspaper, the Ithaca Journal, offers internships for photography students. Students in the Photo Italy course travel to that country for several weeks of hands-on photography in the summer, and other students have gone to countries such as Antigua, China, Madagascar, the Dominican Republic, and South Korea to get a taste of life as working photojournalists. Our students display their work at the Handwerker Gallery on campus and at galleries in downtown Ithaca. If you can picture yourself doing any of these things, this is the major for you.
Artistic Photography in Cinema: Citizen Kane
Cinematography and Photography as artistic mediums have many similarities. By definition, cinematography is the discipline of making lighting and camera choices when recording a series of photographic images for the cinema. Without photography, there would be no cinema. The only difference between the two is that cinema can show movement: whether it’s an object moving within the scene, or the movement of the camera. Because cinema is comprised of a series of still images, combined to record movement, cinematographers must think like photographers because they must take into account the lens, framing, angles, lighting, and composition (called mise-en-scene in film) when setting up a shot.
In 1941, a movie called Citizen Kane completely changed the way we make films today. The movie, considered by some to be the greatest movie of all time, is known for it’s incredible cinematography. Writer/Director Orson Welles, along with Cinematographer Gregg Toland, came up with several new filming techniques that literally changed the world of cinematography.
Another thing that made Citizen Kane stand out from other movies of its time was the way it used low-angle shots. The sound stages in Hollywood filmmaking made it impossible to show low-angle shots without revealing the microphones and lights that hung above the actors. To overcome this problem, Welles built whole sets with ceilings made of draped muslin, so the microphones were hidden above the cloth ceiling. Then, he cut holes in the set floor for the camera, so it could get the lowest angle possible.
Lighting was also an important aspect of Citizen Kane. In this shot, the strong backlighting is used to make the character in front appear as only a silhouette and therefore anonymous to the viewer. The smoke that fills the room helps to show the light beams coming from the projectors as well as the lamp on the table. This use of lighting can also be seen in the image below, in which the high-contrast lighting creates a foreboding atmosphere.
One of the techniques that the movie is most famous for is “deep focus.” As you can see in the image above, all of the characters—including the child in the window—are in focus. Toland achieved this through the use of a wide-angle lens to create a large depth-of-field. When this wasn’t possible, he would shoot the scene with the foreground fully lit and the background in darkness. Then, he would rewind the film and shoot the scene over again, with the background in focus and fully lit and the foreground in complete darkness. This is called an in-camera matte shot, which can be seen in the image below.
Deep focus was also achieved by taking two different shots and superimposing them together on an optical printer. In the shot below, the scene was initially filmed with just Kane in focus on the left side of the screen. Then, it was filmed with just the actor on the right, so the two images could be combined with both characters in focus
Citizen Kane is a great example of how a movie can be considered a series of artistic images. It shows that cinematography is like photography in that it involves capturing images that are visually pleasing to look at. They both require skillful execution while trying to find the perfect shot. This movie is especially important because it used new techniques, which are still in use to this day.
As with still photography, great cinematography depends upon great composition. The following image uses a now-popular camera technique that shows Kane standing next to a mirror that reflects on his life as an old man. The mirror helps to emphasize his reflection on his life, while also showing a well-composed image. Notice how the camera is skillfully positioned to show the many reflections of Kane without any reflections of the actual camera.
Jonathan Brady is currently a film and video major at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His exposure to cinematography goes back more than 15 years, during which time he’s learned film technique from his father on such films as U.S. Marshals and Backdraft. He studied video for three years in high school and worked as an extra on two films: Andersonville and Fight Club.
The competition was announced, and the challenge set – recreate your favourite Asian movie scenes using photography with no digital trickery. We awaited the results of your creativity with baited breath. And we waited, and waited…Nothing happened. Then suddenly at the last minute they came flooding in, and we were witness to some of the most entertaining use of a camera since Pamela Anderson got into home movie making.
It seemed appropriate that such artistic and creative efforts receive the critical acclaim that they deserve, so we asked respected, yet infamously pretentious art critic Sir Charles Canopy-Lallywad to cast his eye over them. His views have nothing to do with KFCC or the competition results, and you are assured that the pompous old codger won’t be back.
‘'Ah! Wonderful! Working as a post-modern collage of pop-cultural mindpuke, this recreates the most famous of images from ‘The Foul King’. The chap in the background appears on the surface to allude to Munch’s ‘The Scream’, yet on further examination, is actually a tribute to Beavis’ ‘Cornolio’. Utilising what appears to be a chicken fillet, this piece reportedly made shovel faced artist Tracy Emin shit pottery.'
The Department of Cinema and Photography offers undergraduate and graduate courses in the history, theory, criticism, and production of cinema, photography, and digital arts. Our educational orientation is a holistic, arts and humanities based understanding of media as social and cultural practice. We are committed to graduating critical, original, and socially responsible artists and scholars who, as global citizens, can imagine and produce alternatives in media theory and practice. We are dedicated to fostering a creative and intellectual climate of active engagement and support for faculty and students.
