“I’ve used Cooke lenses before and always loved them.

I filmed elephant seals fighting for the Antarctica episode. I wanted to try and make the sequences feel and look different to others I’d seen shot, but they are a challenge to film - huge behemoths up to 18ft long and 8000lbs. Thousands of them turn up in mating season and the males prepare to fight for their right to breed,” he recalled. “I used the miniS4/i’s on a gimbal to try and get among them, capture the feel of the combat and creatively control the visual scene. But it’s no easy job moving around these monsters. I was frequently having to jump out of the way as one animal charged another, while others charge past you to escape. It’s one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been.

Outside of the flora and fauna, it’s the huge amounts of time we have to invest and of course the extreme demands we place on the kit, due to the environments we subject them to. I am happy to say that the miniS4/i’s performed flawlessly in every situation.”

"I wanted to test the Sony Venice camera and various lenses, including the Cooke S7/i for IMAX and giant screen projects. For Venice: La Serenissima, we used the Cooke S7/i Full Frame lenses extensively. It became not just my favourite, but my first AC and camera operator’s favourite lenses as well. Even in D.I. we all gravitated more to the images that were shot on Cooke.

We played around with the Cooke’s shallow DOF shooting wide open—something I would not normally do on an IMAX film—but we wanted to get a sense of its character and it’s really beautiful. In our portraits and shots on the canals you can see the texture and quality of the bokeh. The look was seductive. We saw a really nice balance with the S7/i lenses especially shooting the canals with a lot of white marble and turquoise water.

The feel of the Cooke fit my idea of Venice. The look feels vintage without being vintage; legant and full of dimension; modern yet natural, like the eye sees as opposed to something more stylized and geometric. With the type of filming I do for IMAX and giant screens, like my current project, Cuba, I gravitate to what my eye sees naturally—the Cooke Look.”

"Cooke Anamorphic/i SF and original Cooke Anamorphic/i lenses are a great match for our futuristic storyline on The Crossing.

These spectacular lenses give lovely, impressionistic, out-of-focus characteristics behind the subject. The sets and locations behind the actors have a very cinematic feel with beautiful bokeh, but their real strength is how they render faces with kindness— never harsh or too sharp. The new 300mm lens instantly became one of our B-camera favourites to use daily for close-ups.

They handle sunlight and high contrast settings beautifully, especially when shooting in the woods because they help to soften, hold and roll off highlights while keeping shadow detail solid.

“Our use of the Cooke S4/i primes really elevated the look of the film, giving The Good Catholic a bigger budget aesthetic. The S4/i primes give a wonderfully warm and pleasing look that added to the warmth of the church interiors, which were lit by candlelight and tungsten.”

With a great deal of Steadicam work, the S4/i primes were the perfect weight balance to pair with our RED Epic Dragon. In addition, the lenses produced absolutely no vignetting when shooting wide open in 5K.

As a producer and cinematographer, the Cooke S4/i primes perfectly met both of my needs — from a rental cost as a producer, and as an artistic tool as a cinematographer.”

"After testing many combinations of cameras and lenses and having to work on 4K for The Crown, we chose to use the Sony F55 and vintage Cooke Speed Panchros. It was always my intention to fight against the high resolution and ultra-sharpness you get from the modern camera sensors and by using the Cooke Speed Panchros I achieved a very romantic, filmic look with an incredible range of latitude for beautiful highlights and detail on the shadows. I have always enjoyed working closely with the production and costume designers."

"We paired the Sony F65 with the Cooke S4 Prime Lenses to achieve the look of Woody Allen’s film . Our locations became characters in the film but they were also one of the greatest challenges of the production.

We used Cooke lenses because, to me, Cooke is the ‘one’ because they built their lenses for cinema. Other companies usually use photographic lenses, rehoused for use with cinema cameras. We need serious lenses to record the plastic movement of light on every kind of image, from maximum brightness to maximum darkness, particularly into the penumbra, as Leonardo [da Vinci] called it."

"The choice to shoot anamorphic for Stratton was partly for the aspect ratio, but also because I like the characteristics of anamorphic lenses and the way they render 3D space into a 2D image. I tested the Cooke Anamorphics and immediately liked what I saw. They render a sharp image that holds contrast and colour separation beautifully. Beyond technical performance, they've got soul.

It’s about the feeling you get from the image. We chose Cooke Anamorphic/i lenses as our main set of prime lenses for 'Stratton'. I kept the lighting very natural throughout the shoot, but with a clear sense of sources and direction inspired by what the locations offered. We had a wide range of shooting conditions, from bright sunny beaches to urban night exteriors, and dark scenes underwater inside a pipe that was mainly lit by torches and lights that we prepared to look like coloured glow sticks. I was really impressed with how the Cooke Anamorphics held the colour and contrast equally well in each situation. They brought out all the nuances within each shot.”

– Felix Wiedemann, Director of Photography,
Stratton

"We shot a 5 minute documentary and TV spot in very harsh, uncontrolled conditions across South Africa with a mixed style of a lot of run and gun shooting, super high speed, drone and helicopter shots.

Shooting in dark shacks, often with the lens wide open or at T2.8 they performed beautifully without having to think about it too much. The Cookes were thrown around a lot and put through dirty, dusty situations for two weeks straight without a single problem. We really pushed these lenses. They are mechanically superb but the sharpness was the best thing. They’re pin sharp when you need it but have a wonderful fall off to creamy softness in the out of focus regions."

After borrowing an old Mitchell 16mm from his school’s communications department, independent filmmaker Alvin Case taught himself cinematography at a young age. He continued using 16mm and Super 8mm film into the 1990s when he started shooting video. Today, he speaks to Cooke about his decision to use a Cooke miniS4/i 18mm prime lens for shooting his upcoming psychological horror film.

“I just wanted to take a moment and compliment you guys on the quality of your lenses. We recently wrapped a job using the Cooke 5/i lenses for the first time and we were blown away by the performance and quality of the lens in every facet. I do not think we would have been able to achieve the look we wanted with any other lens set. The Cooke look was evident and perfect for the aesthetic we were trying to convey. The skin tones in particular were simply beautiful and I've never used anything that has captured them quite as well.”
Jeff Levine, AC and DIT for Variable

After receiving such a wonderful email, we had to talk to Jeff and find out more about this project….

Greig Fraser started out as a stills photographer, studying at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. While working at a studio production company with both photographers and film makers, he realised he preferred the collaborative way in which the film makers worked, and switched specialisms. He began working with director friends on music videos, commercial spots and short films and gradually built his skillset and an impressive showreel. His cinematography credits include Bright Star, Killing Them Softly, Let Them In, Snow White and The Huntsman and, most recently, the Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty. Here he shares his experiences with Cooke lenses.

Award-winning cinematographer, director, producer, writer, film academy professor, developer of film technology ... Christian Berger has a storied career in film that spans over 40 years and continues to go from strength to strength. Here he talks about the importance of lighting, the wide-ranging effects of digital cameras, and how Cooke lenses have enhanced his most recent films, including Haneke’s The White Ribbon – for which he was Oscar-nominated and received, beside many other awards, from the ASC (American Society of Cinematographers) Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography 2010 – and the latest work, coming in 2013, (working title) The Notebook by director Janos Zsasz.

The recent Channel 4 series World War II: The Last Heroes represented a powerful and novel way of bringing history to life. Latest generation slow-motion cameras and lenses were employed to capture in evocative detail the detonation and impact of real explosions of the same size and power of those actually experienced in World War II. Illustrating a series of moving interviews with aged Allied veterans, the explosions supplemented rare historic footage to tell the real-life stories of the survivors. Co-producers, Impossible Pictures in the UK and Entertainment One of Canada, approached DoP Jeremy Benning CSC to lead the camera team and here he explains how they went about capturing these highly charged sequences.