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Day For Night shooting

Day For Night shooting from Jeff Gatesman on Vimeo.

Day for night is a classic way of shooting a night scene without expensive and huge lighting setups. Instead you shoot during the day and use various techniques to create night in post. I made this image as a test for a short film I am planning to shoot soon. It is best viewed in full frame mode.

Still from original footage

Here is a still of what the original footage looked like before processing. The cool thing about using post techniques to create night is the virtually limitless palette you have to play with: you can create any kind of night look you want, from zombie apocalypse to warm and romantic.

Jan 23, 2012 | Categories: Cinematography, Film Maker, Uncategorized | Tags: Day for night, motion picture, motion picture production | 1 Comment »

Baby Shower – The Doritos Spot

Baby Shower from Jeff Gatesman on Vimeo.

This is the 30-second spot I made for Doritos’ Crash The Super Bowl competition. It did not make it into the top 5.

Now, I’m not going to say that whoever makes the choices over at Doritos has no sense of humor, or that they lack taste or vision, or that they are just down right terrible at making decisions. No, I’m not going to say any those things. I’m going to take the high road, and just say congratulations to the well-deserving filmmakers who produced the five spots chosen by those “decidors” over at Doritos.

I would also like to mention Jennifer Cobb and Laya Portillos who came up with the concept and wrote “Baby Shower”, and who are the two lovely stars of the spot. Without them I would probably have just done something with dogs.

Even if you’ve seen this on the Doritos site–it was highly compressed and the audio suffered from it. Here it is in High Def with a better sounding mix.

Jan 10, 2012 | Categories: Cinematography, Film Maker | Tags: Commercial, Doritos, motion picture, motion picture production, Personal Work | Leave A Comment »

Two Pontiacs entered into the Spider Awards

The Black and White Spider Awards is the leading international award honoring black and white photography. This year I submitted two of my car images, both classic Pontiacs. Click on the thumbnails to get the full view.

Photographing cars has always been one of my favorite things to do outside of actually driving them, and classics are the best kinds of cars in my mind. I just love their curves and all the chrome, I mean if Bling is your thing, the makers of these cars did it over the top and yet, with some elegant style.

I think these two images in black and white are a testament to the timeless beauty of these machines. I hope you agree.

Nov 18, 2011 | Categories: Cars, Photo Awards | Tags: Black and White photography, Car Photography, HDR, Personal Work | Leave A Comment »

My new Stage Zero Dolly

So I got my Stage Zero dolly kit from Dynamic Perception, built it and figured out to make it work. Of course, by the time I was finished it was too late to take it out and set up a shot somewhere (or I was too lazy) so instead I made a shot of the dolly itself.

 

 

Within in the next couple weeks I will post some (hopefully cool) video that I actually take while using the dolly, until then consider this a teaser…

Sep 21, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

What I learned at Alexa School

Thanks to my affiliation with IATSE Local 600, Cinematographers Guild, I had an opportunity recently to attend a class given by ARRI to learn more about their new Alexa camera series and though I have shot with one once already, I did learn some new and interesting facts about what is quickly becoming one of  my favorite camera systems.

(more…)

Aug 26, 2011 | Categories: Camera Hardware, General Thoughts | 1 Comment »