Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Deeeep DoF

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

The filmmakers did draw inspiration from another ghostly classic of the same era: The Innocents (1961), which was shot by Freddie Francis, BSC.

"It was beautifully photographed in black-and-white anamorphic, and has amazing depth of field. They lit everything very hard, shooting at T11, so they didn’t often have to use diopters. We couldn’t do that today, because of the way we use soft light. I later spoke to Freddie Francis’s operator on that film, Ronnie Taylor [BSC], who was our B-camera operator when we shot our exteriors in England. He explained how Freddie had used graduated filters on both sides of the frame to keep the walls dark, and how the actors even wore sunglasses between takes"

- Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK

Phil Parmet: Color Photography

From American Cinematographer, Still Lives, Distant Vistas by Andrew O. Thompson (Dec. 1998)

"There's something very compelling about the graphic quality of black-and-white photography. Color is very difficult to control and can be very distracting. Just look at great works of art that use color selectively. Accenting a huge canvas with a small piece of primary color-- like a red or blue-- against a field of pastels can exert an extraordinarily powerful pull on the eye. In cinema, you can control the palette with art direction, but there's no control over that in the real world for the documentarian and the still photographer. I have seen color photography that I love, but the idea of an image made up of silver on paper speaks more directly to me."

- Phil Parmet, Photographer

John Lindley: Shooting Color and B&W

From American Cinematographer, Black-and-White in Color by Bob Fisher (November 1998)

Lindley made several accommodations to shooting color film for conversion to black-and-white. He used hard light to get crisp separations in scenes with monochrome characters. He also used a dimmer control board for lighting transitions when a black-and-white person left an area and a color character moved in.

"The black-and-white characters would be hard-lit, even though they were occupying the same space where we had soft light on a color character. Almost every light was wired to a dimmer board. The operator watched a monitor with a live video feed from the tap on the camera. We did a lot of cues on the fly as people moved around sets.

Your eye naturally goes to color in a black-and-white world. If you pick up a newspaper that has one color photograph and a bunch of other black-and-white ones, everybody looks at the color one first. It's human nature."

- John Lindley, ASC

He further explains that the same dynamic applies when there are color and black-and-white characters in the same shot.

"That was great if [the black-and-white person] was the character Gary wanted to highlight. But if it was a two-shot and he wanted to feature both characters, I sometimes adjusted the composition to give the black-and-white person a little more prominence."

- John Lindley, ASC

Jan Ralske: Perception of Black-and-White Pictures

From American Cinematographer, A Teutonic Love Triangle by Andrew O. Thompson (June 1998)

Mindful of this dilemma, the filmmakers left their backers unaware of their black-and-white blueprint until the 11th hour. However, this almost put them in the position of having to re-conceptualize the picture's art direction for capture on color celluloid. Attests Ralske,

"One TV station was not going to let us do it, arguing that they don't even broadcast Citizen Kane before one in the morning because it's in black-and-white; they immediately lose their audience, which thinks it's just some cheap old film. But the experience we've had from festivals and 'normal' audiences is an appreciation for the aesthetics of black-and-white. Nowadays there are music video clips in black-and-white, so there's not as much of a problem with kids who are 16-- they don't associate black-and-white with old fashions. Maybe this is a hopeful trend, because even in Europe you don't see many 35mm black-and-white films that make it past the festival route."

- Jan Ralske, Director of Not a Love Song

Vittorio Storaro: Shooting Black-and-White

From American Cinematographer, Storaro and Bulworth by Garrett Brown (June 1998)

Regarding shooting black-and-white photography:

"It would be like having a piano with only three keys."

- Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC

Freddie Francis: Kodak Plus-X Stock

From American Cinematographer, Cinematic Glory by David E. Williams (March 1998)

The Elephant Man was principally shot at Wembley Studios in Panavision, utilizing Kodak's Plus-X stock-- the only monochrome emulsion which met Francis' standards and was available in sufficient quantities. Due to the dearth of black-and-white features, most of Britian's labs had let their processing equipment fall into disrepair, necessitating that the cinematographer do extensive tests with several facilities. Rank finally won the contract. Nopted Francis in the informative tome The British Cinematographer,

"Rank's processing produced a result which immediately filled me with confidence. My first impressions were that the [plus-x] had increased in speed and the grain had diminished to such an extent as to be negligible... above all, it was true black-and-white stock with every minute tone in between."

- Freddie Francis, BSC

Despite the promise, Kodak's emulsion varied in sensitivity (increasing by a full stop at one point), and Rank had some problems delivering the image quality Francis demanded. However, as audiences would attest, the efforts paid off, resulting in an evocative film which retains a haunting, dreamlike textural quality while effectively rendering the gritty reality of the story and setting.

Karl Struss: B&W Special Effects with Filtration

From American Cinematographer, Two-Faced Treachery by George Turner (March 1999)

"The first time Jekyll changed, we used a technique I had devised years before to show the healing of the lepers in Ben-Hur [1926]. Everybody was using orthochromatic film then, which reproduced reds and yellows as black, and gave blue-eyed actors 'fish-eyes.' I had begun using panchromatic film, which is sensitive to all colors. The leprosy spots were red makeup, which registered when shot through a green filter, but when we gradually moved a red filter over the lens, the makeup disappeared. The Hyde makeup was also in red and didn't show at all when the red filter was on the lens, but when the filter was moved down very slowly to the green, Mr. Hyde appeared."

- Karl Struss, ASC

Robert Surtees: Black & White Filtration

From American Cinematographer, Photography for The Last Picture Show interview by Herb A. Lightman (Jan. 1972)

Your exteriors had a dark, brooding quality and very rich skies, which indicates that you must have made extensive use of filtration. Isn't that so?

"Yes. I went back to the old black-and-white Western style of photography, which isn't done anymore, where you have 20 or 30 filters for different types of scenes, as called for. To say how and where you use each filter would be misleading, because you could give the same set of filters to a different cameraman and he would get a different result. In using filters, you sometimes under-expose of overexpose on purpose to get a particular effect. You might use heavy contrast filters-- even as high as a 25 red or a 21 orange-- in your long shots to make the sky darker, but this also corrects everything else in the scene. The whites become whiter; the darks become darker. When you move in for the close-ups, it's a good idea to change to something like the old Aero-2 filter, which gives you more control. Or, if you still have to use the heavy contrast red or orange filter, you balance the lighting by eye through the camera. When you look up, it doesn't look like you have any light on the subject at all, but you're photographing what you see through the filter. If you're stuck using a red filter on a close-up, the face will go chalky where the sun hits it, so, by artificially lighting it, you work it over so the skin doesn't look chalky. You first knock down the sunlight by putting a net up to shade the face, and you then balance your light while looking through the camera. I think that one of the reasons why I was asked to photograph this picture is that not many fellows are shooting in black-and-white anymore, and I'm one of the few left over from the old black-and-white days. You know, what they need now are 21 year old cameramen who have 60 years of experience."

-Robert Surtees, ASC

Robert Surtees: Color vs. Black & White

From American Cinematographer, Photography for The Last Picture Show interview by Herb A. Lightman (Jan. 1972)

From the cinematographer's standpoint, which do you think is more difficult to shoot, black-and-white or color?

"From a technical standpoint, I still insist that black and-white is more difficult. For example, while shooting an actual interior in color, if you pan from a well-lighted figure to an area that is dark but too cramped to place lights where you really like them, you can just flatten that area out and get by. But in black-and-white, if you want shadow, you've got to put it in there, man. You can't depend on fill light to take care of it. You really have to model the subject with light instead of counting on the colors for separation. Of course, the right makeup, wardrobe and sets become more important in color photography. You can sometimes get by with the wrong makeup in black-and-white, and you can help a bad set. You can use smaller lamps, get in behind chairs, and break up walls by putting shadows on them. But on the other hand, in shooting black-and-white, you have to do it. You can't count on the process you're using to do it for you."

- Robert Surtees, ASC

Douglas Koch: Last Night, Lab Techniques

From American Cinematographer, An Elegy for the Earth by Mark Dillon, March 1999

Regarding the film, Last Night

The filmmakers initially considered using reversal film, with either standard or cross-processing but Koch notes, "That seemed fairly risky, and getting local labs to work that way, especially in terms of the cross-processing, was a bit of a problem. Cross-processing gives a nice contrasty image, but the color saturation also seems to increase quite a bit; Don was interested in a more desaturated look." The duo also contemplated shooting color stock, making black-and-white and color inter positives and then re-registering them for desaturation. "By doing that, you can control every shot and every scene precisely," the cinematographer expounds." You can have a higher-contrast black-and-white version and just mix the color in. It was a very exciting idea, but on a film of this scale, we estimated that it would cost an extra $100,000-- the whole film would have become a giant optical."

The technique that seemed most promising during their tests, which were performed at Deluxe in Toronto, was the bleach-bypass process, which Koch tried first on an original negative. "They can do what they call a 'partial' or 'complete' bypass," he elaborates. "The partial seemed virtually invisible-- you couldn't really see any effect from it-0- whereas the full one was quite striking." However, the cameraman decided that applying the process to the original negative would be too much of a gamble. When bleach-bypass was administered at the printing stage, he found the results to be "quite nice, although it created more of a lush look which resembled that of the ENR-type processes." Furthermore, no one in production wanted the film's look to depend so heavily in the printing stage, which could not be controlled outside of North America. Inthe end, bleach-bypass was added at the interpositive stage. Since the process substantially increases contrast, Koch had to light his images flatter than usual and over expose them. According to McKellar, if bleach-bypassing became unworkable, the resulting footage would be "quite garish and flat, because everything-- the characters' clothes and all the walls would be very brightly colored."

Koch shot Last Night on Kodak's Vision 250D 5246 stock. His deliberately over-lit negative was pull-processed two-thirds of a stop in the lab and then underdeveloped slightly to help lower contrast and color saturation. To produce a dense negative with a suppressed grain structure that would allow for greater flexability, he pushed his photography by one stop and then went over by an additional two-thirds-- exposing mostly at a T2 or T2.8.