Contempt

Ed Lachman appears to have nothing but contempt for HDR, so it’s unclear why Netflix chose to stream El Conde in Dolby Vision. Just the same, Lachman must be given credit for repudiating the notion that filmmakers had been shooting HDR for over a century without even knowing it. 

“The technical apparatus of constructing images is being driven by the market place, HDR, more K, 4K, 6K, 8K. If you look at what cinematographers are trying to do, they are trying to get away from that. They’re using lenses from fifty years ago, rehousing Cooke Speed Panchro, K35s, and Kowa lenses. As we speak, I’m rehousing my set of K35s. They were the first lenses I had when I bought a Moviecam years ago. So we’re going in the opposite direction than the industry is pushing us through marketing. I always say this in a funny way. They always say they want to make the digital world look like film, but I never hear anybody say they want to make film look more digital. There is a reason why.” – Ed Lachman

What we question is slavishly imitating the film look (El Conde) rather than borrowing the desirable aspects of photochemical film and pushing it even further (e.g. Clark, Ganglands, Sky Rojo, Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Spy, et al), not because manufacturers are foisting anything on filmmakers, but because the extra range of HDR offers expressive opportunities not previously possible. In any case, ultimately it’s the studios that make the final determination, and as we can see, there appears to be no requirement at Netflix that the look of Dolby Vision masters differ in any meaningful way from the SDR trim.

Try as we might, we were unable to find any support for the claim that manufacturers are in any way responsible for pressuring DPs into shooting any differently than they’ve been doing for the past century; but we were able to find ample evidence to the contrary – including statements by major studios, streaming platforms and producers, interviews with colorists and DPs and by suffering through dozens of Netflix releases like Where the Crawdads Sing and El Conde, to name just two recent examples of Dolby Vision movies that rigidly adhere to the traditional low-con film aesthetic. HDR is nothing more than a natural progression of what companies like Kodak and color scientists like Mitch Bogdanowicz had been striving to achieve all along; and it’s a sure bet that Ansel Adams, whose Zone System formed the basis for Ed Lachman’s EL Zone, would have enthusiastically embraced HDR.

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