14.01.10
RED Camera: Review
When you can buy a camera for approximately £25,000 (admittedly without lenses) capable of producing a major international movie such as Night at the Museum, Che, The Lovely Bones or Angels and Demons, it’s obvious that something dramatic has been happening in the world of movie-making technology.That dramatic development is the result of one camera entering the market: the RED Camera, and more specifically, the RED One. Aimed at the low-budget independent film maker, its incredible image quality, low price and ease of use has taken the movie world by storm, with noted directors such as Steven Soderbergh commenting: "This is the camera I've been waiting for my whole career: jaw-dropping imagery recorded on board a camera light enough to hold with one hand... RED is going to change everything."
Interesting if you’re a film maker, but what has all that got to do with me, I’m a photographer? I hear you ask.
Well, the answer is everything, because not only has RED’s impact on the movie world been like a balloon bursting, it is also being adopted by an increasing number of high-end portrait and fashion photographers across the world. Why? Because the RED allows a photographer to grab a high-resolution image from film stock. It has become an invaluable tool for anyone needing to shoot large-scale print advertising alongside or from commercial footage.
Although as Matthew Wilkins, technical assistant to celebrity portrait photographer Andrew Eccles says: “Its size can be variable, but its maximum resolution is 4,000 pixels in its longest dimension. HD TVs now have a maximum resolution of 1,080 pixels, so the RED shoots almost four times that. Basically, there’s nothing consumers can purchase that can display the RED’s full resolution. As for the still image that the RED shoots, it is equivalent to shooting 8-11MP. About the same as the original 5D.”
So it’s impressive, but not incredible. The key benefit the RED has over everything else at the moment for a photographer is its ability to grab a still from the moving image at a usable quality. The RED is also considered to have the closest colour palette to original 35mm film stock, which is attractive to many cinematographers trained on film. Flat and muted, it is the best neutral palette that a digital camera has been able to achieve, and is therefore lit in a similar way to traditional film work. A favourable quality to work with for many cinematographers, but not for all. Film maker Richard Jobson is not convinced by the RED’s colour palette and as an early adopter of the Canon 5D MkII to shoot films, he chooses the 5D over the RED for its aesthetic quality as well as its economic benefits. “Originally, HD was about economics, but now it’s about aesthetics. It’s digital cinema, not film, and I look
at things with a photographer’s eye, isolating the subject. Too many people get confused with all the hullaboo that’s going on outside the frame. Stanley Kubrick is my favourite director and he was a great photographer,” he states.
Jobson works with the RED but is not a great fan, and is not backward in pointing out its frailties. He’s not the
only one who has found it to be technically fragile on location. If you read the forums and blogs you’ll find lots of comment and talk about the reliability of the RED. However, cinematographer Simon Dennis, who regularly works with Jobson, is a fan and was previously a photographer. He feels a lot of the forum talk is unfounded based on his personal experience. “I ignore blogs and forums; I just get out there and use it and I’ve had no horror stories or problems.”
The RED Camera has blown its competitors out of the water. Even Steven Spielberg has shot two features on it. But its rivals are fighting back. While companies such as Arri and Panavision respond to the RED Camera, the people at RED are looking at the Canon and worrying that if Canon gets its resolution up to 12,000 pixels, RED will be in trouble. The RED is comparatively cheap in the movie industry, but the Canon is ridiculously so. If you consider that on an average £1 million film budget, between £15,000 and £20,000 would be for camera hire, and just four or five years ago a standard HD 2k resolution body was £75,000, it is not hard to understand why film makers are now buying the RED and avoiding rental costs completely. When you look at these hard financial facts and combine them with recent technological advances, it’s not hard to see why the boundaries have been removed from
what is possible in film making.
Film makers are borrowing stills technology and photographers are becoming film makers. There is a definite convergence going on and the equipment is making this possible. There is a long history of stills photographers becoming film directors: Duffy, Bailey, Donovan, Stanley Kubrick, Dennis Hopper, Anton Corbijn and Wim Wenders to name but a few, but now they cannot only direct, they can also film. As Dennis concludes: “The different language between film making and stills people is lenses. Essentially, we are both talking about a little black box that records high-definition images with a great lens.”
So photographers are using film cameras to shoot stills and commercials and film makers are using DSLRs to create films. The cross-over has begun, but how does the film industry feel about all these photographers moving into their world? Well, it doesn’t seem to be a problem, because as we move into their world, they’re moving into ours. The movie industry has embraced the 5D MkII, and now the 7D, as the camera they have all been waiting for.
As photographer-turned-cinematographer Dennis has found out recently: “I was in LA and I was talking with a Hollywood cinematographer who had been shooting side-by-side comparisons on the set of TV show 24 with the 5D MkII, and it was just blowing people away. They just couldn’t understand how you could shoot such incredible footage on a stills camera.”
The 5D and 7D have also been picked up on by directors such as Shane Hurlbut, the recent director of Terminator Salvation, who has fallen in love with the possibilities of shooting with such a small camera. He says it’s “game-changing technology. You can now take every rule you ever learnt about photography and throw them out the window.” Another film director to see the benefits of working with the 5D is the British director of Atonement, Joe Wright, who used it to film The Soloist last year with the award-winning director of photography Seamus McGarvey, himself a stills photographer-turned-film maker. Dennis feels we are now in a position of there being a two-way flow between the worlds of photography and movie making: “I did a shoot recently with Claudia Schiffer for Harper’s Bazaar in the States. The photographer wanted a film noir look, and they brought me in to light it. My agent was like: ‘Strange!’, but I think it was about the photographer thinking three-dimensionally.”
This concept of three-dimensional thinking is something many photographers have been moving towards over the past few years. Initially via photoshop and its associated filmic techniques, and now with the actual moving image.
There are a number of people out there using DSLRs to create incredible movies, but few will have the hard-hitting impact of the work created by American freelance photojournalist Danfung Dennis. Having started his career with the Associated Press in Beijing in 2006, he began travelling to Afghanistan the same year to cover the escalating violence, and in 2007/8 he covered the war in Iraq.
Now based in London, his stills work is published worldwide, but his work with the moving image is what is getting him noticed. Shot on a home made rig with a 5D MkII, fitted with a 24-70 f/2.8 L lens, his film Battle for Hearts and Minds is a compelling piece of film making that needs to be seen to be believed. He says: “The first mistake
I made was to shoot video as stills, I had to invest in ways of communicating via film. I took a risk taking the 5D into an uncontrolled environment. It’s not easy, but the image quality is unprecedented. A lot of photographers are drawn to photography for its purity, but video is far more time consuming.” Dennis feels it’s about breaking down walls. He says: “There has always been a brick wall between us, but now let’s just break that down and come and go. What’s exciting is when you now go to networking events, there will be stills and movie guys there, which is much more creatively exciting. By rights you should be paying a lot more for the RED and the Canon, but you’re not, and it’s just a case of us learning from each other.”
In our interview with stills photographer Andrew Macpherson (page 80), he says: “I think you’d be a fool to think you can be a photographer now. You can be a video director or you can be a director who enjoys photography, but to try to be a photographer without mastering the art of video now, of film making in all of its forms, you’d just be a fool. You cannot be a photographer alone. If anyone is reading this and they’re a kid or at college – [study] video.” That’s a pretty emphatic stance from a successful stills photographer. However, when I relay this opinion to Richard Jobson, he gives a completely contradictory reply, stressing that he feels photography is the skill to learn.
As always, when a revolution begins and the lines haven’t been drawn, opinions conflict. But on one point, everyone I speak to agrees: the world of stills photography is at the beginning of a new age, the age of imaging – an age in which an openness to new technology, conventions and working practices is going to make the difference between a professional photographer who is working and one who is not.The film makers are definitely one step ahead of the game, and the concern for photographers has to be to not get left behind. This may not be affecting you yet, but as Bob Dylan famously sang: “Something is happening, you just don’t know what it is.” Hopefully now you do.
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