Cinematography Salon

Xavier Dolléans, AFC, is a French cinematographer known for international film and television. He discusses transforming Cairo into Baghdad for High Value Target, coordinating massive desert raids with cranes, drones, and multiple cameras, and recreating the era’s complex light. He also explores spherical lenses, postproduction texture, Egyptian crews, practical VFX, and how interrogation scenes evolve with emotional pressure.

Doug Emmett made Lucky in Los Angeles through the spring of 2025, took three weeks off, and went straight to New York to prep Furious with Brian Kirk, who directed the first two episodes. He got the job after an interview at 4:45 in the morning from a trailer in the desert, where Kirk told him the deck he had built was the opposite of what he had in mind. Showrunner Liz Meriwether then had the department heads rehearse their studio pitch on group Zoom calls until it ran under a minute. The color rule came from the locations. The townhouse and the FBI office hold one color temperature, while the police station, the women's shelters and the street mix warm desk lamps, mismatched lampposts and flickering fluorescents. A green tube in a kitchen ceiling became a named color, Alice Green, and returned in episode six to turn the skin tones in a shower scene strange. After testing 20 lens sets, he remembered the fireworks behind Brad Pitt in Killing Them Softly and went to Panavision G series glass modified by Dan Sasaki. In a 60th-floor penthouse walled in glass, the question was "where do the lights go when you have mirrored walls everywhere?" Most went into the ceiling.On Lucky, for Apple, Emmett followed Yaron Orbach, who started the series, and worked with Greg Yaitanes on episodes two and three and Jonathan van Tulleken on six and seven. The references were Tony Scott's: Spy Game for the FBI offices, Man on Fire and its long lenses for an oil refinery. Flashbacks ran through a hand-cranked 35mm camera that Emmett cranked himself, rolling back to double expose, with the VENICE as his light meter. For a night drive across the desert, he ruled out big units down the road as too sourcey; after a test under a full moon, the sequence was flown on a heavy-lift drone with a VENICE and a fast Master Prime. His habit, which he traces to Harris Savides, is to "try and keep the equipment outside the room."CREDITSDoug EmmettWebsite · IMDbJared Levy, hostInstagram · Website · IMDbDavid Kruta, producerInstagram · Website · IMDbTopher Hammond, producerInstagramMUSICOriginal music by One Wave.THE SALONEpisode page and full gallery: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/doug-emmett-furious-luckyNewsletter and events: cinematographysalon.comInstagram: @cinematographysalonPRESENTING SPONSORThis episode is made possible by Fujifilm — home of GFX ETERNA 55, the large format, IMAX®-Certified digital camera, and FUJINON cinema lenses. https://fujifilm-x.comFUJIKINA comes to New York, October 16 to 18: three days of exhibitions, talks and workshops on the Lower East Side. Schedule and tickets: https://shopusa.fujifilm-x.com/fujikina/SUPPORT THE SALONThe podcast, the writing, and both Resources tools are free. No paywall, no membership, no login. That is on purpose: learning to light a scene should not depend on what you can afford. Sponsors cover part of it and readers cover the rest. If you want to chip in, it starts at the price of a coffee a month at https://cinematographysalon.com/support. If your company wants to reach working cinematographers, get in touch at https://cinematographysalon.com/sponsors.

Pat Scola, ASC, the cinematographer behind Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One, discusses crafting The Death of Robin Hood with grit and restraint. He explores brutal mud-fight choreography, minimal coverage, shifting aspect ratios, and color as emotional storytelling. Scola also reveals how firelight rigs, near-black night exteriors, Vermeer-inspired compositions, and an unrated Kodak stock shaped the film.

The Invite, Olivia Wilde's comedy for A24, plays out almost entirely inside one San Francisco apartment, where a couple played by Wilde and Seth Rogen host an evening that goes sideways with visitors played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. Adam Newport-Berra, ASC photographed it on 35mm, in story order, on a Los Angeles soundstage with a single day of exteriors in San Francisco. The brief he set himself was that one enclosed space should feel, in his words, like a landscape, and never like a set.The first plan was to light it practically, in the spirit of Husbands and Wives, and let the actors move in and out of shadow. A test with the cast said otherwise. Nobody liked the dailies, and Newport-Berra got some phone calls afterward. What replaced it was hard ceilings, because an open set lit from above reads as a set, with the light built into the ceilings. Key grip Adam Kolegas fabricated low-profile softboxes, tube fixtures wrapped in muslin and skirted, light enough to hang from putty knives slid into the stretch-canvas ceiling and quick enough to pop off in ten minutes when the camera needed to tilt up. Gaffer Len Levine ran them by remote. Doorway moldings that dropped a foot below the ceiling hid the boxes behind them, and six to eight more lights sat on the floor for nearly every setup. With production designer Jade Healy and costume designer Arianne Phillips, the walls, the wood, and the hosts' clothes were kept dark so the faces would carry the light; the visitors' wardrobe was made to stand apart from the room. Every shot in the film, he says, is very lit.There was no shot list on set. Newport-Berra wrote one for the whole film, in a Google Doc, and says he never looked at it once. Prep was a wall of two hundred reference frames, and each morning he walked the set before anyone else arrived, photographing angles on his iPhone with his crew standing in for the cast. Wilde, who stepped into the role of Angela after an actor dropped out, ran each scene with the cast, then handed it to a stand-in and watched from outside while she and Newport-Berra picked frames. The camera stayed on the dolly and mostly locked off; there is no handheld in the film. The tools were lens, height, and eyeline. Norton is held slightly low on a 35mm, almost heroic. Cruz moves on Steadicam on a longer lens. Rogen and Wilde are pinned flat against a wall with too much headroom. For the couple's first argument the rule was cat and mouse: never on the same level, never in the same frame, together only in mirrors and window glass, until the scene lands on a head-on two-shot. The last shot of the film, a move through the building's shaftway that Healy had designed the set around, went at four in the morning on the final night on stage.CREDITSAdam Newport-Berra, ASCInstagram · Website · IMDbJared Levy, hostInstagram · Website · IMDbDavid Kruta, producerInstagram · Website · IMDbTopher Hammond, producerInstagramMUSICOriginal music by One Wave.THE SALONEpisode page and full gallery: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/adam-newport-berra-asc-the-inviteNewsletter and events: cinematographysalon.comInstagram: @cinematographysalonPRESENTING SPONSORThis episode is made possible by Fujifilm — home of GFX ETERNA 55, the large format, IMAX®-Certified digital camera, and FUJINON cinema lenses. https://fujifilm-x.comSUPPORT THE SALONThe podcast, the writing, and both Resources tools are free. No paywall, no membership, no login. That is on purpose: learning to light a scene should not depend on what you can afford. Sponsors cover part of it and readers cover the rest. If you want to chip in, it starts at the price of a coffee a month at https://cinematographysalon.com/support. If your company wants to reach working cinematographers, get in touch at https://cinematographysalon.com/sponsors.

Gustav Danielsson, FSF got the job by text message. "Do you wanna shoot a sequel to Game of Thrones?" arrived from director Owen Harris, who had made San Junipero with him, and it landed while Danielsson was at home rewatching the original series with his kids and buying them the board games. He cut short a show in Sweden to take it. The result, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is HBO's return to Westeros at a fraction of the usual scale, and it earned him a 2026 Emmy nomination for cinematography.He and host Jared Levy work through how you make a two-hander feel as large as a war on a budget that rules out burning cities. Night scenes pushed into the half hour of real dusk, the same trick he used on San Junipero because South African nights go completely black. An Alexa Mini LF shot at 3:2 and squeezed to 2:1 on Panavision Ultra Panatars, whose 1.3x squeeze fills almost the whole sensor, with faster Panavision VA spherical primes held back for the scenes a single double-wick candle had to carry on its own. Every flashback on one de-tuned Panavision T Series lens built for Super 35 and run on a larger sensor, so the image falls apart at the edges on purpose. Firelight from a bank of up to 48 photo flood bulbs that gaffer Seamus Lynch built and named the Dalek, programmed against video of a real fire. And the afternoon an oven on set caught fire for real, which Danielsson spent a few seconds trying to dim.CREDITSGustav Danielsson, FSFInstagram · Website · IMDbJared Levy, hostInstagram · Website · IMDbDavid Kruta, producerInstagram · Website · IMDbTopher Hammond, producerInstagramMUSICOriginal music by One Wave.THE SALONEpisode page and full gallery: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/gustav-danielsson-fsf-a-knight-of-the-seven-kingdomsNewsletter and events: cinematographysalon.comInstagram: @cinematographysalonPRESENTING SPONSORThis episode is made possible by Fujifilm — home of GFX ETERNA 55, the large format, IMAX®-Certified digital camera, and FUJINON cinema lenses. https://fujifilm-x.comSUPPORT THE SALONThe podcast, the writing, and both Resources tools are free. No paywall, no membership, no login. That is on purpose: learning to light a scene should not depend on what you can afford. Sponsors cover part of it and readers cover the rest. If you want to chip in, it starts at the price of a coffee a month at https://cinematographysalon.com/support. If your company wants to reach working cinematographers, get in touch at https://cinematographysalon.com/sponsors.

James Laxton, ASC, award‑winning cinematographer behind Moonlight and The Underground Railroad, recounts joining Season 2 of Beef and carrying its visual DNA forward. He discusses using large format for portrait weight. He explains the season-as-seasons color strategy, tackling silhouette-heavy episode eight, and the high-pressure car fight night where performance came first.

When Tari Segal, ASC, took over the Las Vegas block of Margo's Got Money Troubles, the A24 series for Apple TV adapted by David E. Kelley from Rufi Thorpe's novel, she had three days and a working casino floor on which to extend a look someone else had established. It is the episode that earned her an ASC Award nomination, and in this conversation with host Jared Levy she is candid that the shoot ran closer to triage than choreography.She walks through the problems in order. Faking a dead chandelier with PAR cans on the floor of a heavily tinted steakhouse when the circuit blew near sunrise. Building a full WrestleCon arena in a day and a half for Nicole Kidman's first day on the show. Putting Margo full frame through the then new ARRI Hero lenses so the world melts around her during the OnlyFans sequences. Negotiating a single 30 minute rotation of the High Roller observation wheel, its camera synced to a second unit shooting Nick Offerman a block below.It is an hour on solving the unsolvable to a television schedule, and on the crew that made it fun, espresso martinis after wrap included.CREDITSTari Segal, ASCInstagram · Website · IMDbJared Levy, hostInstagram · Website · IMDbDavid Kruta, producerInstagram · Website · IMDbTopher Hammond, producerInstagramMUSICOriginal music by One Wave.THE SALONEpisode page and full gallery: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/tari-segal-asc-margos-got-money-troublesNewsletter and events: cinematographysalon.comInstagram: @cinematographysalonSUPPORT THE SALONThe podcast, the writing, and both Resources tools are free. No paywall, no membership, no login. That is on purpose: learning to light a scene should not depend on what you can afford. Sponsors cover part of it and readers cover the rest. If you want to chip in, it starts at the price of a coffee a month at https://cinematographysalon.com/support. If your company wants to reach working cinematographers, get in touch at https://cinematographysalon.com/sponsors.

Against the backdrop of industry upheaval and the rise of AI, Nicholas Lam joins hosts Ava Benjamin Shorr and David Kruta to explore what it means to future-proof creativity. Lam critiques performative diversity initiatives, warns against chasing trends, and makes a case for human, low-fi storytelling as the antidote to algorithmic content. Taking a personal turn, Lam recounts losing his home in the Los Angeles fires of January 2025, and shares how the filmmaking community rallied to support him, reshaping his priorities and reinforcing the importance of showing up for others. That experience reframes his view of work, stripping away the false urgency of the industry and grounding him in relationships over accolades.Nicholas Lam’s Instagram | WebsiteAva Benjamin Shorr’s Instagram | WebsiteDavid Kruta’s Instagram | WebsiteThis episode is sponsored by Fujifilm, Sandisk and TCP Insurance.Show notes, stills and credits: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/nicholas-lam-how-losing-everything-teaches-us-what-really-matters/

Director Mike Pecci joins host David Kruta to dissect the chaos of post-COVID Hollywood, the false promises of AI disruption, and the suffocating gatekeeping of the studio system. Pecci lays bare the existential challenges of trying to create authentic work in an industry gripped by fear, algorithmic control, and vanishing opportunities. In a world where pitching feels like shouting into a void, Pecci finds power in simply continuing to create, and the filmmakers who will survive are the ones who know how to make something out of nothing—and do it with heart. For him, AI is not the enemy. Mediocrity is. Mike Pecci’s Instagram | Website | Watch 12 KilometersDavid Kruta’s Instagram | WebsiteThis episode is sponsored by Fujifilm, Sandisk and TCP Insurance.Show notes, stills and credits: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/mike-pecci-hollywood-will-always-play-it-safe-until-you-show-them-something-they-cant-ignore/

As fears mount over AI’s impact on creative labor, cinematographer and technologist Jim Geduldick joins host David Kruta to dissect the frenzy surrounding artificial intelligence and its encroachment into the film industry. As AI-generated imagery floods social media and marketing departments chase cost-cutting automation, Geduldick challenges the doom-and-gloom narrative with a nuanced, insider perspective—arguing that while jobs may shift, human storytelling will remain irreplaceable. However, decades of tech disruption, from DVX100s to LED volumes, won’t change the fact that great filmmaking has always been—and still is—about the people behind the lens.Jim Geduldick’s InstagramDavid Kruta’s Instagram | WebsiteThis episode is sponsored by Fujifilm, Sandisk and TCP Insurance.Show notes, stills and credits: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/jim-geduldick-the-machines-are-here-to-take-your-job-but-only-if-you-let-them/