American Cinematographer - May 2017 - 12

President's Desk
The Black Cat and the White Cat

Photo by Jacek Laskus, ASC, PSC.

When I was a cinematography student, my classmates and I enjoyed learning from a rather eccentric
teacher. He was supposed to illuminate the technical aspects of cinematography: f-stops, depth of
field, basic optical principles, etc. Rarely, though, did he ever get around to that. Instead, our afternoons were usually occupied with his obscure cinematic experiments or his short films in which he
appeared as a blind man wandering through the world.
I was recently reminded of one of his technical experiments. On a sunny afternoon, he arrived
at the school with an animal carrier that contained two cats, one black and one white. These were his
pets Noir and Blanche, their names meaning "black" and "white," respectively, in French. The question for the afternoon was how to deal with them in shadow and sun while retaining detail in their
fur. And the challenge, of course, was that we were shooting on black-and-white reversal film, with
an effective latitude of maybe 4 stops.
The photographic solution was to put Noir in the sun and Blanche in shadow - which might
sound easy but was no simple feat to realize. Who has ever met a cat that takes orders? But after a
few sardines and a handful of scratches, we accomplished the task and excitedly rolled some film. When we screened
the footage the next day, it was a revelation: Both Blanche and Noir showed up with nice detail in their fur.
This was my introduction to Ansel Adams' "zone system," a particular method of determining what you want
to see reproduced in a photographic image in order to create an impression and tell a story - almost like a painter
using a brush. The zone system allows us to relate a subject's various luminances with gray values ranging from black
to white that will be represented in the final image. This forms the basis of the visualization process, whether the photographic representation is intended to be literal or a departure from reality.
What brought these memories back to me was a recent encounter with a digital-capture system that boasts a
15-stop latitude and a great variety of postproduction controls for manipulating density and color in selected areas of
the frame, taking advantage of that extended latitude to retain maximum detail from the shadows through the highlights. With this system, Noir and Blanche could be photographed peacefully eating their tuna in sun and shadow -
and then made to look like identical gray cats!
In today's world of greatly extended latitude and super-sensitive capturing systems, you can, in most cases, shoot
in available light. You can walk out into the world, photograph it, and come home with an image. But the question
remains whether that image fully expresses or uses to a great extent your abilities as a cinematographer.
How we light a scene is one of the most important choices we make in the expression of our artistry. It deals
with density, color contrast, and the photographic reproduction of black and white. I am fully aware that we can arrive
at these choices in post, but there is much to be said for making these decisions in the moment of creative inspiration,
which largely exists on the set.
In the end, I don't think we want to visually portray our world in a blend of gray where everything is visible. I
don't think Ansel Adams went about his craft that way. And I don't think Noir and Blanche would rest in peace knowing
they might possibly both be gray today.

Kees van Oostrum
ASC President

May 2017

American Cinematographer

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - May 2017