Understanding Digital Theory
David Stump · 2021
Cinematography is the art of capturing, recording, and manipulating motion pictures on a medium such as film or a digital image sensor. The discipline that underlies cinematography is the mastery of matching the tonal range of creative scenes in front of the lens to the measured capability of the sensor medium behind the lens in order to artistically capture and record that tonal range. Both human vision and film negative respond to a doubling in intensity as approximately one stop of change in perceived brightness. In the late 1980s the Cineon digital film system developed a logarithmic encoding for film scanning. Both human vision and exposure of silver halide crystals in film emulsion exposure are similarly nonlinear, and can be approximately modeled either by a logarithm or by a power law function. A digital camera sensor is composed of a grid of photodiodes arranged in rows and columns.