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Bugs
DOP - Peter Nearhos
“This was a two day project with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, where I was shooting insects at the Melbourne Museum. I used a range of macro and wide angle lenses including my Canon 100mm 1:1 macro with extension tubes and 65mm 5:1 macro. I also used the new Laowa probe lens 24mm f14 and their 60mm,15mm and 25mm macro lenses.”

“The nature of macro filming requires everything to be incredibly still. If you can imagine shooting a bug on a leaf with the merest of breeze, and now imagine that magnified. That movement can be as much as ten times the length of the bug, so everything has to be really still with this sort of work, and yet, to give the impression that this is being filmed in the wild and not in the studio we also use a small fan to move the background foliage without too much movement on the subject.”

“When you are shooting something this small you want hard lighting too. Even a 10mm diameter light on something this size in macro is like having a soft light. So a harder light is needed if you want your images to look sharp. Having the whole scene back lit also makes things sharper, so we use very little fill light.”

“This was the first time I had shot with the Laowa probe or the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K. The great thing about the probe is it will cover all of the 4K sensor. Larger 4K sensors tend to play havoc with your depth of field with this sort of work. So the smaller micro four thirds sized 4K sensor is much better for this kind of shooting.”

“When I first started shooting in 4K in 2012 for the BBC’s ‘Life’ series, I found it challenging. When shooting a Peacock Spider, which is the size of a grain of rice, you can pull focus from its eye to the tip of its tail; which is only about 4mm! So depth of field becomes incredibly narrow when you have that much magnification. But the micro four thirds inch 4K sensor makes things a bit easier when it comes to depth of field.”

“I have to say the 13 stops of latitude was also really great, because you can see into all of the dark spots. Which is very good when you are using hard lights, because you have detail well into the shadows under leaves and things. The other great thing about this camera is the really high native ISO. I tended to stay around ISO 2500 but you can go as high as 25,600. There are other cameras with insane ISO levels, but they become incredibly grainy which means a lot of work in post. I think Blackmagic have their ISO at a sensible level. Given that for most macro filming you will be using lights, the 25,600 ISO with this camera is all you’ll ever need.”

“I found the new Laowa probe lens gives you a really unique view of stuff with a 24mm lens at f32, but you do need a lot of light. So this is when the higher native ISO and the dynamic range of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, really helps a lot. We were shooting in ProRes HQ, but if you were shooting in RAW then you’d have even more detail for color grading afterwards. If you had less control over your lighting than we had, then having RAW as an option certainly gives you far more flexibility.”

“When you look at the super close ups of the mantis head in the footage, you can see how this camera delivers on all that color and detail. We even managed to get the luminous glow of the mantis’ antenna with our back lighting. Focus is critical with these types of shots too, so I always fall back to the peaking on the screen. Having red highlights onscreen for focus really helps. And then for exposure, I tended to use the histogram in the camera rather than the false color mode. For me, the histogram is a pretty accurate indication of where you are, and what you have left to color grade.”

“The funny thing about insects is that they are like little robots that will go to the same place over and over, until they suddenly stop. So this makes shooting things like the stick insect running along the stick with a probe much easier. Where your lens is mounted right on the end of the probe, every time you pan along with the insect it looks like these beautiful smooth tracking shots.”

“With most of these shots I was shooting at 25fps or 32fps, because it just slows things down that little bit more. With macro it’s best to be very selective in the use of slow mo as it tends to change the character of things. That is, unless there is a particular behavior we want to showcase that is too fast for the human eye; like for instance the lunging jaws of a mantis shrimp! Generally higher frame rates are used to give things extra weight. When you are in close with a wide angle lens and you slow things down by half, it gives the appearance of making an animal look three times its size. When you slow down an insect, it too suddenly looks a whole lot bigger.”

“I find that shooting macro is like shooting advertising product shots. You have your bug there and you are always tweaking lights to get it just right to make it look as good as possible. With this sort of filmmaking it really is all about the lenses. Some cameras just get in the way of your creativity and what you are trying to capture. Camera menus can be a nightmare and they just seem to make it so difficult to navigate around.”

“But not so with this camera. I found the big screen is brilliant and easy to get around, just like a mobile phone. The OS is really very good and intuitive too. I also found the shutter angle on this camera was very easy to adjust. I work at 180 mostly, but I did shoot at 360 with no shutter to get some more stops occasionally. I am not a technical person, I am more into lenses and bugs. So I really like a camera that is easy to use!”

DOP

Peter Nearhos

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K

ProRes 422 HQ

ISO 2500

Laowa Probe 24mm, 60mm Macro 2:1, 15mm Wide Macro 1:1, 25mm Ultra Macro 5:1 EF mount, Canon 100mm 1:1, 65mm f/2.8 5:1 EF mount.

Laowa 7.5mm Micro Four Thirds mount.

Metabones Speedbooster Ultra

Aputure LS C300d and LS-mini20 daylight LEDs