Are photos in 16:9 actually cinematic? feat. Ashenspire ‘Hostile Architecture’ Release Show

Almost everything related to photography becomes influenced by the idea of ‘‘cinematic’’. Which is cool. Cinematic is obviously a positive word to have associated with your work…but I’m still not really sure what it means.

Is it about how you present the images? Is it how they’re shot? Is it pure composition and technical accomplishments or does it entirely come down to purpose? Is it evoking the spirit of film or could it be emulating the cleanest, expensive looking modern production styles? Is it all of that or none of that?

No idea.

Anyway, despite having no idea what I’m doing (rare) I decided I want to see if I could start to make my photography feel a little more cinematic and Ashenspire’s release show for their excellent record ‘‘Hostile Architecture’’ was my first shoot since said decision and it felt like the perfect place for it.

The devastatingly raw and exposed nature of their music lent itself to something that felt a bit more like a film. That, and the strong political concepts behind the record, and the sense of community displayed at the sold out show, have a depth that could easily be documented cinematically.

At least in my head.

So I set my preview crop in my EVF to 16:9 to force my compositions to be more focused on the way you’d capture images for a film as opposed to as pure photography and set about shooting a truly ferocious and vital show.

It was a pretty satisfying challenge to shoot this show with this restriction on how I wanted to compose. Even more challenging when combined with avoiding both the low light the flicker of the LEDS there were, forcing me to drop my shutter speed to a point well below what I’d normally use for hand held photography and blast my aperture wide open. (1/160 and f1.4 if you’re a nerd who cares)

But, all those self-imposed limitations forced me to focus and compose. I had to attempt compositions multiple times to get what I wanted, frequently focus manually or shoot several frames to either capture the flicker where it was aesthetically pleasing or absent. The results where a lot of image that are noisy, have motion blur and are much less than perfect exposures…but I think they captured the vibe of the intense performance and rabid atmosphere much better as a result.

Bands like this aren’t about carefully cultivated perfection, its about shared moments. At the risk of getting too wanky, you can’t experience those moments if you’re too focused on how they should be captured, rather than how you can capture them.

Shooting like this forced me to engage with the moments more as I had to be inside them to make the limitations work. I couldn’t snap and move on, relying on the technology or exposure I’d already set to do the job for me. I had to live in each moment to capture them.

Also, what a lovely change of pace it was to photography purely for how I’d like the photos to look and not worry about how they’d translate onto social media. Not that I was able to totally shake that consideration, it’s pretty engrained given my job, but it was nice to not have it at the forefront.

Using Mastin Labs excellent Natura 1600 emulation in Lightroom I think I was able to bridge the gap nicely between all the modern technological advances for capturing images inside my R6 and something that felt a bit more classic and…cinematic I guess.

Occasionally the colours break, especially across the red/purple/magenta cross over, the saturation is pulled right back, the strobe LEDs throw weird lines and red shadows and the focus runs a little softer throughout the images. Like it might do if these stills were part of a sequence and I do think something about the composition of 16:9 leans into that a bit. Though I’m not convinced from this exercise that format alone is a sufficient, or even necessary, condition for something being cinematic.

So is shooting in 16:9 to make photos cinematic cool? No idea. But this show was cool, and getting to photograph it was even cooler.