Cinephotography with the F55
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he F55 takes this convergence of still and video to the next level, even though it is, really, a dedicated digital motion picture camera. No matter, I’ve found it allows me to not only shoot the highest quality 4K footage, but it allows me to then pull stills of sufficient resolution, directly from the video files, that I could then publish in a magazine. This isn’t possible with any DSLR. You might be thinking, but wait, the resolution of the F55’s sensor equates to only about 10 MP, apples to apples. Perhaps, but a few years back when I was still shooting Kodak® film for work, my only digital camera was the small Leica point and shoot mentioned above. It wasn’t unusual for me, though, to submit files from that camera to magazines. And not once did I receive a complaint; they reproduced onto the printed page just fine. So with that established, I needed to get down to the nuts and bolts of this experiment, so I organized a camera test with the F55 to photograph a model from LA Models. I also did some research on the interwebs before my shoot, and spoke to some friends, and learned that what I’m doing is called Cinephotography and it’s a thing.
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The F55 takes this convergence of still and video to the next level, even though it is, really, a dedicated digital motion picture camera.
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It seems a handful of photographers have used various models of digital cinema cameras to capture still images, or have rendered stills for print use from the footage they were generating for commercials and other projects.
Since I also was booked to shoot a fashion story for a magazine here in LA, I thought it would be cool to use the F55 for that also. So one sunny Monday afternoon at my loft in Downtown Los Angeles, I fired up the F55 with the sole intent of pulling still frames. Naturally, I shot in 4K RAW for all the aforementioned benefits that shooting RAW affords. During my transition from DSLR to shooting with a full-fledged cinema camera like the F55, shooting in RAW was one of the most directly translatable and easy-to-understand, concepts.
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