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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

If you use a DSMC...

Not that it's that important in the grand scheme of things, but Cinephotographer rolls of the tongue a bit better methinks- the brain, mine at least, wants to separate the two common terms "cinema" and "photographer" too much to make cinemaphotographer a natural thing. And no, Cinephotographer/Cinephotography aren't trademarked (:
 
Graeme Nattress said:
Photographers have always been cinematographers, just at a very low fps....

Graeme
Click to expand...

I wanted to put it the other way round. Cinematographers were always photographers, just darn quick on that release button!

up to 250times per second faster.... I heard... :D
 
The trouble with Hybrids is that there like mermaids. When you want a fish you get a women, when you want a women you get a fish.

I kid and I quote.
 
At this point, wouldn't they be called "dreamers"? You ship it, then we'll worry about what to call the people who use it.
 
I do have a beloved project coming in October, where client doubts in frames taken from a "video"; let me prove him wrong!
 
What is a filmmaker in the age of YouTube?

What is a musician in the age of Garage Band?

Tools don't mean anything anymore. And I'm glad for it.
 
What about money? How should a cinemaphotographer charge? Sometimes we give away our rushes while a photographer keeps the original material. But how would a "cinemaphotographer" charge if he has no knowledge of what will be the destiny of the material produced? Stills could be taken from an HD footage for web use and probably a cinematographer wouldn't be able to complain....likewise, 14 Mp stills can be taken out from Epic footage and the cinemaphotographer, who was actually hired as a cinematographer, will have no claim over them...
 
Enrique...This is quite a question. One that is on my mind too. All the old rules change as this Cinemaphotographer idea takes hold. Just 2 weeks ago I "gave" some 3 year old footage I shot on my own to a friend of mine that is cutting some pieces for a NBC sports show. Well sure enough the first few shots of the tease were mine! Hmmm now what? Who do I bill? Should have asked that before I guess. Live and learn. In the past I never had any rights to the footage in the video model as the production company took them. But stills are different and now DMSC is different too. In an extreme example...If I was on a shoot that I am working on a day rate for a production company and suddenly a plane crashes nearby and on my own I shoot it...Whose footage is it? The big difference is the ease of access to the footage. With film this could not be a question. Tape stock also went to the production company at end of day. But now I keep a copy of shot footage for backup on my raid. I have a lot of motion footage that would make for great stills. My contracts extent to "video" ... Do I own the still rights? Is gets blurry as to who owns these images and new rules need to be written as to this question. At least with my clients.

On the flip side. If I own an Epic and a monopod as Mark Toia has shown recently...AND if in the next version of REDCINEX there is built in stabilization... Suddenly I am a casual looking photographer who is actually shooting some of the highest quality motion footage out there. HMMM I really think that the key to unlocking this is Stabilization in RCX. Just imagine!

Good shooting
 
enrique blein said:
What about money? How should a cinemaphotographer charge? Sometimes we give away our rushes while a photographer keeps the original material. But how would a "cinemaphotographer" charge if he has no knowledge of what will be the destiny of the material produced? Stills could be taken from an HD footage for web use and probably a cinematographer wouldn't be able to complain....likewise, 14 Mp stills can be taken out from Epic footage and the cinemaphotographer, who was actually hired as a cinematographer, will have no claim over them...
Click to expand...

I remember reading a while back about this sort of issue - either here or on another list. It was a very enlightening discussion and featured input from both photographers and videographers/cinematographers. On the whole, the end point was basically that any sort of contract - between production and the artist, between production and the client, and/or between the artist and client - needs to be detailed and specify exactly who owns what rights and under what circumstances the footage may be used.

Personally, I like the photography model where the artist retains ownership and copyright to the material and others are essentially given a license to display/edit/alter it in certain forms or to certain extents. That's a pretty foreign concept to many people in the moving picture industry, though, as you have alluded to. It is actually very interesting to me how different the "image capture" arts are in terms of copyright and ownership over the material.

I would love to hear - now that this is becoming a reality - how people are dealing with it.
 
Taylor, You're right about stabilization in RCX...

Regarding rights, new contracts would have to be made, because if phtographers would be running out of jobs, then DSMC shooters would at least have the right to receive the money for still extracted from motion work, to say the least...

So DSMC, in terms of rights over material, doesn't put you above photographers? I think it should: Photographers sell the stills for a period of time, maybe this should be applied to stills extracted from motion.
 
Michael Olsen said:
I remember reading a while back about this sort of issue - either here or on another list. It was a very enlightening discussion and featured input from both photographers and videographers/cinematographers. On the whole, the end point was basically that any sort of contract - between production and the artist, between production and the client, and/or between the artist and client - needs to be detailed and specify exactly who owns what rights and under what circumstances the footage may be used.
Click to expand...

This is a hotly debated topic that rears its head from time to time. Image ownership (still or motion) is usually dictated by whatever terms a person is hired under. If no specific ownership terms are defined, which would be foolish for both the cinematographer/photographer and whoever hires them, then ownership consideration defaults to whatever the local laws dictate. In the USA and many countries that are conscious of copyright and IP, ownership of the imagery defaults to whoever pointed the camera and acquired the image (the photographer or cinematographer). IT DOES NOT MATTER IF IT'S STILL OR MOTION OR "VIDEO", ETC..!!!! There is a common misconception that motion or video somehow has different ownership laws. Not true.

The exception to this is a "work for hire" arrangement, where the photographer or cinematographer is hired to take pictures (or motion pictures / video) for someone else. This is a form of "commissioned work", in which case the ownership automatically transfers to whoever is paying to have it done. In most situations, it is assumed that whoever is doing the hiring is going to end up with all rights to the imagery. Such hiring arrangements that cannot be substantiated through a written contract, you know, like a verbal agreement, handshake deal, etc.. are typically viewed as "work for hire" if they must be reviewed by the law. Traditionally, disputes were often decided by seeing who had possession of the camera negatives. As in, if a photographer handed over the original negs to someone, he had relinquished ownership, or maintained ownership by maintaining the original camera negatives. For motion pictures, film reels were delivered to a lab or someone to develop them, often paid for by a production company or producing individual, and the film negs were never touched again by the cinematographer. Modern cases are often decided the same way, even with digital media. If the photographer has never relinquished the RAW or camera-original files, it is the same as holding onto the film negatives. This can backfire on the photographer though... If someone can show they were hired under a "work for hire" arrangement, they still may be forced to hand over the original images.

The photography industry doesn't have different laws than motion video or motion photography, etc.. They have different practices and business models. Once again, it's a common misconception that laws are different between shooting still images and shooting video. Here in the USA images are images, whether they are a static frame or shot at 15000fps. Motion is nothing more than a series of still images replayed in a sequence to give the illusion of motion. You don't suddenly lose your rights to images you acquire just because you acquired relatively higher numbers of them and present them in a different way. As a photographer or cinematographer, your images are yours as soon as you push the button to acquire something. Same thing as any other type of artist or creative person. If you are an illustrator or painter, your artwork is automatically yours... But commissioned work automatically transfers unless you withhold rights to it.

The photography, especially portrait and private event photography, industries have created business models to use the laws to their advantage. They typically don't enter into "work for hire" arrangements and they charge for their time, not the images or services related to them -- that is billed extra and often on a per-image basis. That is why they have sitting fees or session fees. It's not that the laws are different for photographers, the practices are different. If a photographer who currently works off sitting fees and retains all ownership to their stills were to buy an EPIC and drop it right into their every-day workflow, it wouldn't change a thing. Instead of clicking an image here and there, but rolling at 96fps nearly the entire session, nothing would change. They would just have a huge amount of images to sift through. And they could now also sell motion portraits too...

Best thing to do is to consult a good attorney and have them work with you to draw up some contracts and agreements that serve your business.

Oh, and there's a fine line between being a solid business person who covers all the bases and being a complete douchebag. If you hand over R3Ds to a client and tell them they have full rights to use them for their corporate videos, but they will have to pay you more if they decide to extract individual frames for print ads and billboards, you're being a douchebag. Don't micro-manage ownership. Once you relinquish camera negatives or RAW data files, you're done. If you have such a client that will be doing multiple things with the footage you shot for them, price your services and subsequent ownership of the imagery according to what they will do with it and be done. If someone is hiring you as an AC or operator, that's about as clear-cut "work for hire" as it gets. Do your job, go home, don't worry about it. Even if you bring your own camera and push the record button.
 
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I think "Cinephotographer" sounds better to my ears than "cinemaphotograper".
Anyway, with a tool that makes still and motion, even if motion is a succession of stills, you're more filmmaker than photographer.
does "Filmphotographer" seem good? Not really ! Imagemaker or framemaker have a lack of precision...
Now I'm gonna take my pills and sleep on it ! :D
 
I feel the need to go shoot a couple MoPho's...

That be Motion Photographs.
 
Thanks for that input, Jeff. That's exactly the sort of analysis I was talking about.

And MoPho is fantastic.
 
OptiTek said:
easy to transpose to PhoMographer (not that there is anything wrong with that:smile5:)
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Er... I'm gettin' lost.... Momographer... phomographer... And if YOU'RE SHOOTING 300FPS ARE YOU A SLOWMOGRAPHER ??? :w00t:
 
And the new art movement can be called Static Dynamism.

I can hear the interview already:
"Yes, actually, I'm a Static Dynamist, but that doesn't mean I eschew the historical narrative, no, not one bit, in fact ....."

Just shoot the bastard and move on ( :
 
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