Emulating Cinematic Style Photography

Blog by: Russo Mutuc

Cinematic photography, more like letterbox framing in my perspective. I revisited this technique after a couple of years. After going through my database of photos, I came across some of my old photos I touched up years ago. Strange how the emotional connection to this style of technique has changed the way I view it. Maybe it's because the influence from the pro's I get to hang out with in the film industry, especially, the cinematographers. Viewing films, the society has been trained to look at images a certain way. The manipulation of the photo, by cropping the image to look like a letterbox, has changed the mood of the image. The way I present them manipulated in cropping, color, sharpness, contrast, depth-of-field, and composition has created a whole new way of presenting a cohesive story from the batch of pictures. I've yet to learn the exact color tones of how film looks, but I will probably end up coming across this information eventually. For now, I just simply enjoy touching up the photos. It's been a break from the normal shoots I have been doing.

The images I chose to edit was all shot with either my Nikon D80 or Canon 5D Mark II.

Here are some examples from the edited still frame letterbox pictures.