Notes from Behind the Lens
Eight observations from the texture of working as a DOP, written down before I forget them.
I keep a notebook on every shoot. Not for the shot list — that’s on the call sheet — but for the things that happen on the day that I don’t want to lose. Most of them are not stories in the conventional sense. They are observations about how the work actually gets made, which is different from how the work is taught.
What follows are eight observations from sixteen years of professional camera work. They are not anchored to specific clients or projects — the discipline of confidentiality matters, and the observations are general enough that they don’t need to be. They are anchored to the daily life of the work.
1. The first hour of every shoot is the hour the day is decided
The crew arrives. The talent arrives. The light is set to what was planned. The first take happens. Everything that goes wrong on the rest of the day is, in my experience, traceable to something that was wrong in the first hour and was not addressed — the grip stand that wasn’t quite stable, the actor who wasn’t quite warm, the look that was nearly right and got waved through.
2. The gaffer knows things you don’t
I have worked with maybe twenty senior gaffers in my career. The good ones all share one property: they have been on more sets than the DOP they’re working with. They have lit scenes the DOP has not lit, and seen lighting plans fail in ways the DOP has not seen. The DOPs I respect treat that knowledge as an asset, not a threat.
3. Locations have moods the scout cannot capture
A location scout walks through a space, takes stills, notes power access, measures floor plans. The output is a folder of reference. What it cannot capture is what the space feels like when twenty people are in it making a film. I have started doing my own location visits, separate from the scout’s, just to stand in the room.
4. The actor is doing the same job you are doing
The trope of the DOP and the actor in opposition — the DOP wanting precision, the actor wanting spontaneity — is mostly a media-trade fiction. In practice, good actors and good DOPs share an interest in the work being right, and they tend to align on what right means.
This is a preview. The remaining four observations are being edited for publication; the full essay will appear here once the writing series begins. The observations are synthesized from sixteen years of working sets and contain no client-confidential information.
Shaharbin Aboobacker is a Director of Photography based in Vancouver. He has worked across commercial, narrative, immersive and documentary forms in India and Canada since 2008.