Recent content by David Mullen ASC

Besides the Botanical Gardens (Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn), you might check out Green-Wood Cemetery and the Cloisters. Madison Square Park is also quite lovely in spring but unfortunately the Flatiron Building is covered in scaffolding and netting. Besides Central Park, don't forget Prospect Park.

Sorry for the late reply... There are so many cameras on the market today that it is hard to answer, not knowing your budget or what type of photography you are most interested in -- a good street photography camera might be different than one for landscapes, for example. Today's smart phones...

Sorry, I've been shooting non-stop since the New Year... I can't really answer the question about where in Europe to get one's start since I got my start in the U.S. I had been shooting short films since I was a teenager then went to graduate film school (CalArts) when I was 26. I loved movies...

I shot "The Love Witch" -- we tried very hard to match that 50's/60's look, shooting on slow film stock and a lot of hard light. I studied a lot of movies on the era, so if there is a "tinge of not getting the full look" then it's mainly because it wasn't actually made back then, not that we...

Every show is different, sometimes the shot list is a collaboration between the director and the cinematographer, sometimes it's just the director's list, sometimes there is only a list for big complex scenes or only for the first few days of shooting. If I don't have the time to prep a list...

Depends on the budget and schedule. Think of it this way, if you have a 100 page script and 25 days to shoot it in, you'll have to average 4 pages a day. Of course, in reality, some days are heavier than others to balance the actual work better, it takes longer to shoot some types of scenes...

Unless you can afford a very large light on a very high condor crane, or a couple, hopefully on a bit of a rise or hilltop... you aren't going to be able to backlight a whole road at night. You could try a series of side-lights, maybe with a black flag on the camera side if you start to see the...

I don't really think of exposure that technically -- if I'm shooting in a way to get good blacks and less noise by how I rate the camera and how I set-up the monitors, then I just expose faces for however dark in the frame I want them to go. I suppose if I didn't have a good monitor properly...

Log really isn't meant to be viewed on a monitor, it needs some sort of LUT or at least, a serious boost in contrast by playing with the dials on the monitor. Viewing Log means you are seeing the noise floor of the image when you really want to keep more shadow detail above that, which, yes...

The only thing about fire is that it gets bright, so the more overexposed it gets, the less color you will see in the flames (as opposed to the color of the light it shines on the subjects, which is less bright than the flames themselves.) Think of the flames as the light bulb inside a lamp...

I think whether you make the streetlight effect soft or hard is more a matter of the mood of the scene - realistically it's hard-ish, roughly a 1'x2' source 20' in the air, so not pin-sharp but not soft. But I've hung a soft box from a small condor over the scene for more of a soft toplight...

I might do a quick sketch for a particularly big set-up coming down the road, but the only real lighting diagrams I've done has been for soundstage sets in pre-production, for all the rigging that has to be done. Not sure what you mean by "samples"... my website has still frames from some of...

We were between some trees and I had two 20'x20' silks overhead (which was not enough to cover the green) so the rain was somewhat backlit by the bright sky behind the trees, otherwise I didn't do too much lighting, just some HMI fill. I bounced a small HMI (maybe a 1.2K HMI PAR) off of the...

I'm not an equipment owner so I've never had to do that... I'd talk to a tech at a rental house like Clairmont Cameras for advice.