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Cinematography finds uses in many fields of science and business as well as for entertainment purposes and mass communication.

Contents [hide]
1 Etymology
2 History
2.1 Precursors
2.2 Film cinematography
2.3 Black and white
2.4 Color
2.5 Digital cinematography
3 Aspects
3.1 Cinema technique
3.2 Image sensor and film stock
3.3 Filters
3.4 Lens
3.5 Depth of field and focus
3.6 Aspect ratio and framing
3.7 Lighting
3.8 Camera movement
4 Special effects
4.1 Double exposure
4.2 Frame rate selection
4.3 Other special techniques
5 Personnel
6 See also
7 References
8 External links
Etymology[edit]
The word "cinematography" was created from the Greek words Greek: κίνημα (kinema), meaning "movement, motion" and γράφειν, graphein "to record", together meaning "recording motion." The word used to refer to the art, process, or job of filming movies, but later its meaning was restricted to "motion picture photography."

History[edit]
Main article: History of cinema
See also: History of the camera
Precursors[edit]

Muybridge sequence of a horse galloping
In the 1830s, moving images were produced on revolving drums and disks, with independent invention by Simon von Stampfer (stroboscope) in Austria, Joseph Plateau (phenakistoscope) in Belgium, and William Horner (zoetrope) in Britain.

William Lincoln patented a device that showed animated pictures called the “wheel of life” or “zoopraxiscope”. In it, moving drawings or photographs were watched through a slit.

On June 19, 1873, Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed a horse named "Sallie Gardner" in fast motion using a series of 24 stereoscopic cameras. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse's, and each camera shutter was controlled by a trip wire triggered by the horse's hooves. They were 21 inches apart to cover the 20 feet taken by the horse stride, taking pictures at one thousandth of a second.[2] Although it was never played back at speed to create motion, this was the first step towards motion pictures.

Nine years later, in 1882, French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey invented a chronophotographic gun, which was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, recording all the frames of the same picture.

The late nineteenth to the early twentieth century brought rise to the use of film not only for entertainment purposes, but for scientific exploration as well. French biologist and filmmaker Jean Painleve lobbied heavily for the use of film in the scientific field, as the new medium was more efficient in capturing and documenting the behavior, movement, and environment of microorganisms, cells, and bacteria, than the naked eye.[3] The introduction of film into scientific fields allowed for not only the viewing "new images and objects, such as cells and natural objects, but also the viewing of them in real time",[3] whereas prior to the invention of moving pictures, scientists and doctors alike had to rely on hand drawn sketches of human anatomy and its microorganisms.

Film cinematography[edit]
Main article: Film stock
File:Roundhay Garden Scene.ogg
Roundhay Garden Scene (1888), the world's earliest surviving motion-picture film.
The experimental film Roundhay Garden Scene, filmed by Louis Le Prince on October 14, 1888 in Roundhay, Leeds, England, is the earliest surviving motion picture. This movie was shot on paper film.

W K. L. Dickson, working under the direction of Thomas Alva Edison, was the first to design a successful apparatus, the Kinetograph, patented in 1891. This camera took a series of instantaneous photographs on standard Eastman Kodak photographic emulsion coated onto a transparent celluloid strip 35 mm wide. The results of this work were first shown in public in 1893, using the viewing apparatus also designed by Dickson, the Kinetoscope. Contained within a large box, only one person at a time looking into it through a peephole could view the movie.

In the following year, Charles Francis Jenkins and his projector, the Phantoscope, made a successful audience viewing while Louis and Auguste Lumière perfected the Cinématographe, an apparatus that took, printed, and projected film, in Paris in December 1895. The Lumière brothers were the first to present projected, moving, photographic, pictures to a paying audience of more than one person.

In 1896, movie theaters were open in: France (Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Nice, Marseille); Italy (Rome, Milan, Naples, Genoa, Venice, Bologna, Forlì); Belgium (Brussels); and Great Britain (London).

In 1896, Edison showed his improved Vitascope projector, the first commercially successful projector in the U.S.

Cooper Hewitt invented mercury lamps which made it practical to shoot films indoors without sunlight in 1905.

The first animated cartoon was produced in 1906.

Credits began to appear at the beginning of motion pictures in 1911.

The Bell and Howell 2709 movie camera invented in 1915 allowed directors to make close-ups without physically moving the camera.

By the late 1920s most of the movies produced were sound films.

Wide screen formats were first experimented with in the 1950s.

By the 1970s, most movies were color films. IMAX and other 70mm formats gained popularity. Wide distribution of films became commonplace, setting the ground for "blockbusters."

Film cinematography dominated the motion picture industry from its inception until the 2010s, when digital cinematography became dominant. Film cinematography is still used by some directors, especially in specific applications or out of fondness of the format.

Black and white[edit]
From its birth in the 1880s, movies were predominantly monochrome. Contrary to popular belief, monochrome doesn't always mean black and white; it means a movie shot in two-tone color. Since the cost of color films was substantially higher, most movies were produced in monochrome until the 1970s. Almost all short silent films from the 1880s to the 1910s, almost all feature-length silent films from the 1910s to the 1920s, and most feature-length sound films from the 1920s to the 1970s, were produced in monochrome.

In the 1970s, cinema mostly switched over to color films as they became more economical and viable. Monochrome cinematography is still used by cinematographers for artistic reasons or for specific applications.

Color[edit]
Main article: Color motion picture film
File:Serpentine Dance (1895) - yt.webm
Annabelle Serpentine Dance, hand-tinted version (1895).
After the advent of motion pictures, a tremendous amount of energy was invested in the production of photography in natural color.[4] The invention of the talking picture further increased the demand for the use of color photography. However, in comparison to other technological advances of the time, the arrival of color photography was a relatively slow process.[5]

Early movies were not actually color movies, since they were shot monochrome and hand-colored or machine-colored afterwards. (Such movies are referred to as colored and not color.) The earliest such example is the hand-tinted Annabelle Serpentine Dance in 1895 by Edison Manufacturing Company. Machine-based tinting later became popular. Tinting continued until the advent of natural color cinematography in the 1910s. Many black and white movies have been colorized recently using digital tinting.

In 1902, Edward Raymond Turner produced the first films with a natural color process rather than using colorization techniques.[6] In 1908, kinemacolor was introduced. In the same year, the short film A Visit to the Seaside became the first natural color movie to be publicly presented.

In 1917, the earliest version of Technicolor was introduced. Kodachrome was introduced in 1935. Eastmancolor was introduced in 1950 and became the color standard for the rest of the century.

In the 2010s, color films were largely superseded by color digital cinematography.

Digital cinematography[edit]
Main article: Digital cinematography
See also: Digital movie camera and Digital cinema
In digital cinematography, the movie is shot on digital medium such as flash storage, as well as distributed through a digital medium such as a hard drive.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Sony began marketing the concept of "electronic cinematography," utilizing its analog Sony HDVS professional video cameras. The effort met with very little success. However, this led to one of the earliest digitally shot feature movies, Julia and Julia, being produced in 1987.[7] In 1998, with the introduction of HDCAM recorders and 1920 × 1080 pixel digital professional video cameras based on CCD technology, the idea, now re-branded as "digital cinematography," began to gain traction in the market.[citation needed]

Shot and released in 1998, The Last Broadcast is believed by some to be the first feature-length video shot and edited entirely on consumer-level digital equipment.[8] In May 1999 George Lucas challenged the supremacy of the movie-making medium of film for the first time by including footage filmed with high-definition digital cameras in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. In late 2013, Paramount became the first major studio to distribute movies to theaters in digital format, eliminating 35mm film entirely.

As digital technology improved, movie studios began increasingly shifting towards digital cinematography. Since the 2010s, digital cinematography has become the dominant form of cinematography after largely superseding film cinematography.

Aspects[edit]
Main article: Cinematic techniques
Numerous aspects contribute to the art of cinematography, including:

Cinema technique[edit]

Georges Méliès (left) painting a backdrop in his studio
The first film cameras were fastened directly to the head of a tripod or other support, with only the crudest kind of leveling devices provided, in the manner of the still-camera tripod heads of the period.