outdoors with DV

vervor · Mar 15, 2005

Will be shooting several important scenes for a short film that takes place outdoors - one on a dock where I'd like to really get the water to stand out as blue and also not have the sky blown out as it often is with DV in order to have everything else correctly exposed...so what can I do to fix? I'd like the blues in the sky and water to really pop because, in fact, the title is Never Saw Blue and the color is an important motif. I've heard there are sky filters that are super-ND'd or something like that on half of them so if you line it up with the horizon the sky has a chance of coming into good exposure - what are these called and are they avail for, say, my GL2 camera with a 52mm ring? I guess I can fall back on a polarizer, but that seems like it'd be chancy. Could I perhaps expose it consistently and then color correct in post and hope we can get it to work out? Hopefully someone has experiene with this - Mr.Mullen?

Thanks in advance,
Aaron

David Mullen ASC · Mar 16, 2005

Unfortunately the sea is a photographic subject that looks very different in different lighting and weather conditions since it is essentially a big mirror reflecting the sky. To get the water bluer, you tend to need to shoot in front-light on a clear day, which helps with the sky as well. Exceptions are when using a Pola, in which case side-light is better to make the sky even bluer. So front and sidelight (with a Pola) on a sunny day will get you more color than backlight or overcast weather.

You can use blue grad filters but it's better to use the square filters in a mattebox so you can slide the filter up or down, rather than a screw-in round grad filter.

You can also create color grad effects in post digital color-correction with tools like Power Windows in a DaVinci for example.