Shooting flat with the AF101

Shooting flat with the AF101: "I have to admit the AF101 takes alot of time before you get the good stuff out of it. It's an 8-bit camera with about 10 stops of latitude. About the same as what you get with one of the Canon DSLR cameras. Thanks to the extensive array of settings in this camera you can tailor the captured image to suit different scenes. By default you have a bunch of scene files for different looks but you can set these to what ever you like or that suits your needs. These are some framegrabs from last weeks project shooting for SJ (Swedish railway). Mostly talking heads and I wanted to get the most out of an unlit environment so I used my 'cine' custom scene file.

With the 'cine' setting you get a washed out image with the greatest latitude. I really like to, when possible, shoot in this mode just because it gives me options when it comes to grading. I can choose to do a contrasty grad like the image on the right or stay with something like the ungraded image on the left. I also tend to shoot a little bit warmer than spot on to get warmer faces. By it self the AF101 is very accurate and in some situations a bit to cold for my liking. One of the tricks to get the most out of the AF101 is to expose right until it clips but never (or seldom) overexposure. There's plenty of details in shadows and you can always choose to blow a highlight in post but it's harder to save something already clipped. I also find a low chroma setting like -4/5 to get me what I want. The exception to the never overexpose is when you have out of focus stuff in the frame. The softer they are the more you can push them above clipping. When you shoot with these settings in direct sunshine you can push it all the way up until clipping and skin tones will look great. The image above is ungraded and straight from the MTS file. Since there's always some harsh look in direct sunlight the flat look of the 'cine' setting makes it look good for such hard light. You might think it's shoot with a higher contrast gamma but that would have looked lesser than the flatter settings. Again the trick is to avoid clipping and especially at faces. To stay just below 95% gives you a safe exposure. This one was at 5600K preset and despite chroma being at -5 there's plenty of facial tones. I had to lit a couple of interviews with my LED600 set and ended up using only one for this and used a floor standing 3200K balanced bulb based light that already stood in the corner. Just to give it some 'opposite' side light. I like how portable and versatile LED lights can be but at the same time I find them to be less than a fluo like kinos. As you can see the image on the left (ungraded) has to much chroma and to warm. I like it to be a little bit warmer than spot on to get facial tones warm and lower in post but this was just to warm. I had a diffusing filter gel mounted in front of the LED and doing that makes for a more pleasant lighting. The one on the right is graded to fit in the mood of the film. Still warm but balanced. White balance can be tricky when dealing with mixed lights. Often there's little time to make the right decision, but faces comes first then white and then all the other colours. When in my 'cine' scene file since the image is so flat looking it can be hard to judge you have the right facial colour. I found a trick to be useful and that's to set it up in my 'clean' setting, which gives me something of a WYSIWYG, and then switch to a flat setting just before you start shooting. It works like using LOG and a LUT to view how something will look in the end and still capture the widest dynamic range you can. This one was shoot using my 'clean' setting. It has alot more contrast in it and I can do less with it when grading. The upside is I can see how it will look in the end right on the monitor which with a flat setting can be tricky. I also let the camera choose white balance and in doing so it ended up this warm. Regardless of which scene file you use, overexposure is a bad thing with this camera. Stay out of it! These are my 'cine' and 'clean' settings: Cine Detail/V detail: -5 Chroma: -5 Gamma: Cinelike D Matrix: Norm2 Clean Detail/V Detail: -4 Chroma: -4 Gamma: Cinelilke V Matrix: Norm 1 "