We spent the week’s classes focusing on two areas of cinematography; exposure and focus. Before I started this studio I had a baseline knowledge of things like f stops and focal lengths and that, but I had never had classes that detailed explicitly how each area of the camera works, and more importantly why things occur when you change aspects of the camera. We spent a lot of time around exposure and how to go about having the correct exposure as well as how to measure the exposure in terms to the whitest whites to the blackest blacks. This was so helpful to learn but it also made me slightly mad that I was just now learning this information in my final year of study, a feeling I’m certain I wasn’t alone in.

While learning these different areas of cinematography like how depth of field works and how different areas of the camera affect this field, it made me think back on everything I’ve shot in my life and thinking about how useful this sort of information would have been. Not so much the explicit details of the camera we were using but the central question of why something happens when you change a certain areas of the camera and how that impacts what you are shooting. So often when I’ve shot something I would have, with my rudimentary knowledge of cameras, fiddled around to try and not overexpose the image, or to make sure nothing was out of focus, but outside of that I wouldn’t know why other elements of the shot were changing with what I was doing.

It is this sort of learning procedure of discovering why something changes when you alter something else is what I really responded to in the audio field, an area where a slight manipulation in one area would completely alter another seemingly seperate aspect. I am really looking forward to one day being able to understand the world of intricacies that the camera can offer as well as I know the world of sound.