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Cinematography is the art or science of motion picture photography. It is the technique of movie photography, including both the shooting and development of the film.
What is cinematography? and why it is so imporant for the film industry?


Cinematography involves the composition of a scene, lighting of the set and actors, choice of cameras, camera angle, and integration of special effects to achieve photographic images desired by the director. The Cinematography focuses on relations between the individual shots and groups of shots that make up a scene to produce a film's effect.

The person in charge of the Cinematography is the Cinematographer. The Cinematographer is a person with expertise in the art of capturing images either electronically or on film, it can be considered in the crew of a film as the camera operator. The chief of the Cinematographer is the Director of Photography.

The Director of Photography is the person in charge of the process of recording a film as instructed by the director. The Duties of the Director of Photography includes the selection of the film, cameras, lenses and setting up the lighting to assure a good image and a good cinematography of the film. 




So far we have discussed that the Cinematography is the art of motion picture photography, but what does this mean? The movie, or film is made up of frames. The Video Frame is one of the many still images that composes the motion picture. What we really see as video are actually still images going one behind another in less than a second, 24 frames to be exact. when you manage to reproduce 24 frames in one second you give the sensation of movement, when this happens, then you have created motion picture, and as we explained before, the Cinematography is the art that takes this motion picture photography to film, combining it with techniques in lightning, choosing the correct shot, lense of camera, camera angle and ultimately producing the effect we see in a film.

Couple of famous cinematographers include:
Nestor Almendros
Gregg Toland
Sven Nykvist.

To understand a little better what cinematography is, and for a little practice, check this video out.

Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematography
http://movies.about.com/library/glossary/bldef-photo.htm
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cinematography
http://presentationsoft.about.com/od/uvw/g/95video-frame-definition.htm