Cinematography: Image Creation and Theory for Cinematographers and Directors

T.I.T.I.: 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!!!!

United States on Sep 26, 2023

Chiara forte: Libro completo, molto interessante.
Unica pecca: molto pesante

Italy on May 15, 2023

Abhishek Mohanty: Really a Bible for Filmmaker's & especially for those cinematographer's with a big vision.

India on Aug 17, 2022

Zack: 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.

United States on Dec 02, 2021

Lin Hampton: I have given this book a 5 purely on the basis of the information it provided. It is well set out, clear with excellent examples. I didn't read it from cover to cover because I was only interested in particular information, and here the layout made it very easy to identify areas of interest and areas I could skip.
If I was rating the book as a physical product alone it would get a 3. Typos and misprints were frequent enough to be noticeable and the layout of pictures, illustrations and tables often didn't have any relationship to the text. It was annoyingly common to have to hunt through the text for referenced figures or tables. If it is not possible to keep figures and tables close to the relevant text it would have been better to put them in a common location such as the start or end of a chapter.

Australia on Feb 02, 2020

brainleek007: A fantastic book. Covers the artistic side as well as the quite deep technical elements. Never getting bogged down in technicalities for the sake of it and always managing to keep it releveant to the topics at hand. It's densely packed with very useful information and I've really enjoyed all of it. The challenege is remembering and putting all this good stuff into practice!!

The sections on continuity were enlightening as were the parts on colour theory and how cameras actually work.

A really excellent reference - if you film with any degree of seriousness you should have this book.

United Kingdom on Jul 09, 2019

Kindle Customer: I have to give this book (the Kindle version) three stars. The content is extensive and excellent but the typos greatly distract from the book's quality. And, for whatever reason, the number of typos seem to increase as the book progresses. It's a real shame this wasn't proofread. Even a simple spellchecker would have caught a lot of the errors though it wouldn't have caught the perpetual caption mislabeling on photos. Please, please correct the Kindle version.

United States on Mar 26, 2019

Peter: Full of detail and great photos and illustrations to guide you into the world of cinematography, from both an artistic and technical viewpoint. I would definitely recommend this book although in some places there are lots of details without much explanation or background. I have found this to be a similar issue in the lighting book by the same author - they seem to start using terms and names that have no explanation and some of the explanations are not very clear. Nevertheless it is a useful tool and worth purchasing!

United Kingdom on Nov 07, 2018

capamazon: 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...

United States on Mar 14, 2018

Conrad J. Obregon: 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...

United States on Jun 15, 2017