Moments through the end of last year. Location scouts and exploration. 
Through the most challenging times and through the most awe inspiring ones I find I'm becoming more sentimental. 

50mm Nikon + 2x anamorphic ( Sankor 5e )
Surprised at how much can be retained with the low contrast flare. 

Building out a custom stack. For the longest time I've been piecing together a personal style. Testing digital and film, figuring out what works and what I like and then trying to bundle that attribute into a "function" . I often run my project through a group stack with pre and post blocks as powergrades that don't change much. 

Prep - main - post

1) Tone curve, MTF contrast , grain
2) CST conversions - Arri Log C to Davinci Wide Gamut + levels (squeeze and drop lol ) and subtractive saturation + highlight compression + split tone colour
3) Film Contrast DCTL + Mid to high remapping.

I've been looking for something where I can just shoot to taste and run everything through a stack with minimal switches. This way I can have a passable finish in minutes for entire projects. 
I shoot and colour my own stuff so it's a little different from working with a team where the footage has to be passed around. 
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Shot this on the Arri Alexa XT Plus with Spherical ( Voigtlander 58mm f1.4 ) and Anamorphic ( Nikon 50mm 1.8 + Sankor 5e 2x anamorphic block through a Rapido FVD24a variable diopter )

Like still life painting , reps go toward hitting segments of a greater target.
It's weird but to improve quickly it's best to go slow. Setting specific intentional checkpoints. From there we start to become articulate. Accuracy goes up, expressiveness can be threaded in.

​From the start it was like knowing what I wanted to say but not knowing how to speak. Each day I do a bit more to close this gap. Building a playground piece by piece. Eventually getting to play professionally

The amount of work that it takes to make something look easy is absurd. On days when I'm unhappy this still brings me joy to say, it's working. Compressing highlights , lifting shadows, grain structure, frequency based detail, all into a recipe that works regardless of lighting condition. The work is done so we can hit the target every day , at first with less effort, and in time without thought, so the story at the core of all of this can be told. What a journey.​

Log : Progression this week is in the form of the low end of my images. I've been combining a few things together to figure out what type of "punch" my main style should have. I'm leaning into a bit of what I experienced shooting Kodak Vision 3 500T, and some of what I've learned from Walter Volpatto. I also used tools from the homie Kaur in DaVinci Resolve.

These images were captured using the Arri Alexa XT Plus, and the Voigtlander 28mm f2.8. 

Lately I've been shooting more film. Along with that comes processing some of the older rolls I've had in my cameras. 
Here's a bit of 35mm Kodak Vision 3 500T. Shot this on the Nikon F5 with Voigtlander glass. 

Processed / Graded

Original , shot by Jerome Hof on the Kinefinity Mavo Edge

This is a key part of how I study : 

​When learning stuff I usually try to find something to do in the form of drills daily to find new processes and points of failure. 

Have you found there's anything like this that works for you? 

Lately I'm just alternating between a few things :  taking images and trying to fit them into the world of a movie that I like, or I'm taking shots and trying to solve / build a personal style . (in this reference's case I find there's often a lot of untapped detail and color variation "sleeping" in the image. Density + Luminance channel sharpening + scaling push + monochromatic noise ( creating perceptual sharpness) + pushing more colour separation. 

Also sometimes I'm drawing workflow charts to make sense of things.
(Like mentally splitting overall tonal range from contrast ratio.)



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