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I started shooting with gaffer tape on my LCD to force myself to think differently

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I’m sure over the last few years all of us photographers have heard the word CINEMATIC so much that in the end, it lost all meaning. Is every photo with crushed backs and a cyan-orange color grade cinematic? I’d say NO! So today I’ll try to explore what are the factors that add up for an image to be cinematic and what can make or break the cinematic vibe of a shot.

It all started while I was watching a video from Grainydays on YouTube where Jason was using a panoramic camera, the Fujifilm TX-1. A vintage camera that creates panoramic images by exposing 2 shots on film at the same time to get an image that has an aspect ratio of 65×25. The entire concept caught my interest, but since I don’t have ~$6000 lying around to spend on a vintage camera and I don’t shoot film either, I went the DIY route and taped 2 strips of gaffers tape to the LCD of my camera and took it out for a test.

Gaffer tape inventor and founder of Lowel-Light, Ross Lowell, dies at 92

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Ross Lowell, the award-winning director, cinematographer, author, and inventor, died 10 January 2019 at the age of 92. He was a founder of Lowel-Light and an inventor of gaffer tape. According to his wife Marilyn Shapiro-Lowell, he died at his home in Pound Ridge, New York.

10 ways to use gaffer tape on set or in the studio

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Gaffer tape is one of the most useful tools in any photographer or filmmaker’s bag. It comes in handy for so many things, and just to make sure I’ve always got some with me, I keep a roll in each of my bags. And I can’t remember the last time I did a shoot where I didn’t need it for something. In this 2-minute video from filmmaker Burke Cullinane we see 10 great ways to use gaffer tape on set.

Why photographers are hiding their Leica logo with tape

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We live in a terrifying world and the news tell us: just about anything out there is out to get us.

Fear is HOT right now.

So talking about being safe… Does hiding the Leica logo with tape actually serve a purpose?

What is the purpose of this strange behaviour?

Is it possible that one idiot did it and it just caught on?

Here’s 50 ways to use gaffer tape and some of them might surprise you

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In the words of Jay P Morgan, “If you can’t fix it with gaff tape, it probably does not deserve to be fixed”, and he’s right.  Gaffer tape (or gaff tape, if you prefer) is one of the most useful and versatile things you can keep in your camera bag.

Probably the most common use for me is hanging flags from light stands or attaching snoots made from Cinefoil to flashes, but here’s at least 50 ways you can use your gaffer tape, courtesy of The Slanted Lens.

The GaffGun Straighten, Tapes and Secures Cables In Seconds

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If you ever had a set with lots of cables you know how important it is to have them all secured. Even with the best insurance plan you really don’t want anyone stumbling over one of the ‘bumps’. In the ‘good’ scenario, they will stumble curse a little and continue, in the medium scenario they will fall. And in the worse scenario they will take down your $20,000 lights.

So what do you do? You get down on your hands and knees gaff like crazy. Sadly, Gaffing a cable to the floor, while classified as grantwork, is not an easy task. It involves tapping small bits of gaff on the cable and then going back and reapplying gaff to the whole thing.

And this is what the GaffGun is here to solve. The GaffGun is somewhat of a packaging tape dispenser on steroids. You drop a Gaffer roll in the thing and simply roll it on the floor. It has rails to guide the cables and securely gaff them to the floor. This means that it is almost trivial to run cables in a straight line.

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