Follow Exposure for Cine Lenses?

[vcassel]

I was wondering, maybe for a run and gun tracking shot outdoors or a long dolly shot on a complicated set, does anyone use a, uh, follow exposure? Like a follow focus set to a clickless aperture ring? I was thinking of gearing the aperture rings of my lens set and adding this to them in order to better control exposure in shots with complicated or uncontrolled lighting. Any thoughts or better solutions?

 

[RyanT]

People do this every once in a while, they call it an aperture pull.

I've seen people setup a wireless follow focus device on the aperture ring and then the DP sits at the monitor and pulls the aperture as he watches the shot play out. If you're doing big pulls you can hide it in a pan or wipe, but other times I've seen people just do very subtle pulls as the camera moves along.

You could gear your aperture rings, but it just depends on how much you actually do aperture pulls. Just looking at that thing though it just looks like you would end up moving the camera even more than if you just put your hand right on the lens, considering that you now have more leverage on it.

Whenever I have to do them in a sort of low budget setting, I usually just do it right off the lens. Haven't really had issues with it.

 

[vcassel]

I'm mostly having troubles on stabilizer shots outdoors. One hand is on the follow focus crank while the other is on the aperture ring, and I'm not getting good results. I was thinking about maybe rigging up a cage in the future with two wireless follow focus devices with the remotes on each cage handle. Should end up looking ridiculous.