What a Working DP Is Actually Thinking on Set

When you get on a set, you’re hopefully prepared. But sometimes the vision doesn’t fully align with what you see on your monitors, or something just feels off, and you can’t quite tell why. Or maybe you hit a bigger snag, like a location or light issue. Hopefully, you have an experienced DP by your side who can help troubleshoot.

The Wandering DP, Patrick O'Sullivan, recently flipped the format on his YouTube channel. Instead of a traditional critique, he ran viewer-submitted footage through his own inner monologue. What would he be thinking if he were standing next to you on set? Things like, “What's the biggest problem? Can I fix it? How long will that take? Is it worth it?”

Watching someone run that process in real-time is incredibly useful for a cinematographer. What does his eye catch, and what would he have done differently? Check out the video here.

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Know What's in Your Reflections

The viewer footage was a car commercial shot at what seems to be a tailgate and then a football game. One of the first things flagged in the footage is the reflection in the car's hood.

Freeze the frame, and you can see the monitor tent, crew members, and the caravan RV parked in the background. All of it in the car's paint job, plain as day.

Reflective surfaces don't lie. Cars, windows, glasses, anything shiny will show you exactly what's happening on your set. You don’t want to expose the whole operation, especially if you’re shooting narrative.

And once you know that, you have to work backwards from the reflection problem before you commit to a setup. This is why you want a low sun angle when shooting cars when shooting outdoors.

High sun means the sky and everything around you show up in every pane.l Low sun means you control the angle, limit what's reflected, and get a usable image.

Wide Shots Cost More Than You Think

That car commercial submission also includes a crane shot of three cars lined up wide. It's an ambitious setup, hard to pull off on the day.

He flags it as a problem. Big, wide scenes without big resources are among the hardest things to pull off. The tighter shots almost always serve you better when the budget and crew aren't there to support the wide.

Wide shots expose everything. Unwanted reflections, misaligned cars, a trash can that nobody moved… all of it's in the frame. Sometimes they emphasize the emptiness you can’t fill. Tight shots let you control a much smaller area and get away with more.

Later in the commercial, there’s a crowd shot in bleachers that looks really sparse because there’s so much space in it. O’Sullivan says a better choice would be to pack in the talent and shoot them with a tighter lens.

Know what your resources can support before you commit to a shot. If the crane's width isn't working and you just want it because you think it’ll be more impressive, you might actually be burning time.

Your pre-production planning is where this decision gets made. In the day, it's already too late to pivot easily.

Plan Every Small Detail

Speaking of pre-production planning. O’Sullivan also discusses backlighting for exteriors and choosing props, like the grill, that will work more efficiently for you.

That grill creates a lighting problem nobody can solve on set. The Traeger grill is a tall, enclosed box with a giant back panel, which means there's no way to backlight the food inside it.

A lower, open-faced grill could have been turned around, positioned for backlight, and made to look great. The Traeger can't. And now you're standing on a hot parking lot trying to figure out how to light a black box from the front while the clock runs. The food inside looks weird now, the lighting isn’t super natural, and O’Sullivan goes so far as to say the shot isn’t needed. He would have asked for it to be canned.

The questions you don't ask in pre-production become bigger problems later. If you know you need a grill, make sure you know which one you want. You don’t want those "I should have mentioned this earlier" moments.

Shallow Depth of Field Can Work Against You

In the close-up sequences, O’Sullivan keeps flagging the same problem, which is that this team is shooting so wide open that the background has gone completely flat. According to him, his instinct isn't to open up more to get that "cinematic" look. It's to stop down.

Shallow focus is one of those techniques that sometimes gets fetishized by emerging filmmakers. It's useful because it isolates your subject, directs the eye, and creates intimacy. But it's not always the right call, and the footage here is a good example of why.

In these shots, there’s no real depth or dimension, just a soft kind of blob back there. The problem isn't the shallow depth itself. It's that the background is already close and undifferentiated, so there's nothing interesting left to blur.

Stopping down gives you back the dimension that makes the image feel like it has a world in it (though depending on how far you go, you may need to add light to compensate).

Look at what's behind your subject. If it's just a big shape with no texture or contrast, you're leaving production value unutilized.

Pick Your Battles

As a DP, O’Sullivan can calculate how much time each suggestion would take. If he needs a car moved, that’s 15 minutes to get it done, but this would, he says, only make the shot about 1% better. Are you already running over? Let it go, he says.

Not every problem needs solving. What do you actually need to be precious about? What will waste your valuable time? Of course, we always want shots to look as good as possible. But you need to know the cost of nitpicking, and sometimes you just have to do the best you can with the resources you have.