Cinematography: Theory and Practice: Image Making for Cinematographers and Directors

If your goal is to be a member of a large film crew, then "Cinematography Theory and Practice" will give you a solid foundation to understand what to expect as a member of such a crew. On the other hand, if you are a "lone wolf" videographer, this book may exceed your needs.In a well written, if occasionally repetitious exploration, Brown begins by telling how what appears on the screen can be shaped to effectively tell a story. He then turns to explore the tools used to create what goes on screen, including cameras, lighting, camera movement and set operations. His descriptions can be quite detailed, as in the eight pages of the book's smallish type explaining how to work the slate used at the beginning of a take.I was pleased by the discussion called "Linear, Gamma, Log" which explained compression systems designed to extend the range of light in capturing video. On the other hand, I wish the author had had more concrete suggestions on the various settings that one can change in a modern digital camera to create the compression schemes. It's also would have helped if there had been a little exploration of the post-processing that goes into decompressing these schemes.One can gather from the book that the set is organized into a very rigid hierarchy, where a grip would never speak directly to a director, and where each person has strictly defined roles. For a person entering into this hierarchy, Brown explains all the do's and don'ts that a person needs to keep out of trouble.For the "lone wolf" or even small film crew, this book may be overkill. Reading about how a big crew handles things, like the marking of media that has been used and not yet downloaded, can be useful in the translation to smaller operations. On the other hand, exploring the variety of lights that are available on a big production may not be of much use to a filmmaker with a couple of LED panels at his disposal.The book has a companion web site. Readers should not look for an access code on the back cover but just go to the web site and follow the instructions for access. I found the videos there to just repeat what was said in the book, and to be of low quality for book on cinematography.If you want a textbook that tells you about how large production crews work, this book is ideal. For smaller scale operations, you will have to infer a lot.

I have bought many books and watched a ton of YouTube videos but this book is definitely worth the price!! The balance between text and photo samples, technical diagrams, charts, explanation on camera crew’s job and tasks… are just amazing and extremely useful for film students as well as those who want to learn the technology behind cinematography. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!

As a graduate film student, the stories included about how cinematographers work on set are extremely helpful. It's a must for cinematographers who work with multiple people.

The content in this book is absolutely fantastic. However, the e-book is badly in need of a copy editor.I suspect the print edition of this book is fine. (I’ve not seen the print version.) I am using the ebook edition, read on the Kindle app for MacOS. (Date of writing this review: March, 2018, by the way. Hopefully they’ll fix these problems.)I do not recommend the e-book version until someone fixes the hundreds of annoying copy editing mistakes.Get the print version.Problems include:There are egregious misspellings. For example, “STTADIOAM” for “Steadicam” at location 7734.Photographs are often too small and often matched with incorrect captions.There are unusual hyphens where no hyphens are needed.There are occasional pull quotes in the book, but these quotes are presented as if they were regular body copy. Thus one is repeatedly unaware that a pull quote is a pull quote until finally reaching the quote’s attribution line at the very end. It is confusing.Bulleted list items appear as one bullet item per page, with nothing else on a page excepted for that single bullet item (which is typically just a few sentences long.)

It is written for teaching purposes, which means the language isnt too hard. It is understandable, and most of it really interesting. Good book if you want to know about the different aspects of cinematography.

Great book if you're serious about visual story telling.

If you want to really learn about Cinematography, then this is the book to have. Full of helpful and necessary information.

If you are serious about going into film production this is the book you want to get. You learn everything about film production including the crew, equipment, types of shots, frames, etc.