Behind The Frame 03

There’s an unspoken rule in film and photography: the best shots are often unplanned. If I ever needed proof of that, this shot would be it and it’s easily in my top five of all time.

A few months ago I was at a family dinner, we were sitting in a beautiful garden. On my way back to the house, plates in hand, I glanced over my shoulder and saw my fiancée walking toward a little pond. I quickly pulled out my iPhone, found a frame, and everything just clicked.

The blooming wisteria, the pockets of warm evening sun, the archway, my fiancée’s dress — it all came together perfectly in that five-minute window. It might look like I planned the entire scene around peak bloom, but it was pure coincidence haha.

Moments like this are why I always preach mastering smartphone filmmaking and photography. If I’d relied only on my big camera setup, I would have missed this shot entirely..

Interested in learning how to set up your iPhone for high quality filming? Check this post I recently uploaded.

The composition of this shot is quite simple yet very effective in my opinion.

The archway and wisteria build the perfect frame for my subject, in this case my fiancée, and the stone path is the leading line guiding the eye. I just needed to find the right angle so that the subject would be perfectly centred. Nothing more to it really.

I again started by applying my LUT and playing around with the intensity, contrast ratio and saturation. This changes from clip to clip. Since this shot was bright and warm I enhanced the look by adding a little orange to the highlights.

After I was happy with the overall mood I started shaping out the subject a little more by adding a vignette.

I again used the same little trick that I do in almost all my edits: I decreased the temperature of the vignette. That way I get a warm centre and cold roll off towards the outer edges, resulting in an even nicer focus on the main subject.

My final step was enhancing the colors and brightness of my subject. I simply masked her out and added some warmth, saturation and highlight brightness.

Done!

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Exact camera settings from the Blackmagic Camera app

Thanks so much for being here, I genuinely appreciate every single reader.
If you ever have questions or ideas for future issues, feel free to shoot me a DM on Instagram!

Until next time,

Stefan

Minimal tools. Maximum creativity.