The Wandering DP Patrick O’Sullivan is at it again, looking at a viewer’s submitted project to critique their lighting and shot choices. A brave soul gets to share their work, and a professional DP shares insights into what succeeded and what could have been improved. We’re loving this series and learning from it every time a new video pops up.
There’s a plateau most emerging cinematographers hit. You’ve watched the lighting breakdowns, you’ve studied the tutorials, you’ve built your kit, and your images look… well, pretty good to fine. Technically correct. But maybe also a little airless, a little expected.
Today, O’Sullivan reviews a spec trailer and lands on an interesting critique. There’s a zone of competence most cinematographers get stuck in, and knowing the rules might actually be what’s keeping you there.
Check out the video below.
You’ve Learned the Rules. Now They’re Working Against You
O’Sullivan describes a bell curve of lighting skill. On one end, you have total beginners. Those are the people who grabbed a camera and have no lighting instincts yet. On the other end, you have the small percentage of DPs making distinctive, interesting images.
And then there’s the bulging middle. These are the people who’ve learned enough to be competent but not enough to be interesting. The trap is that absorbing YouTube lighting tutorials puts you squarely in that middle zone.
You know the three-point setup. You know where your key goes. You know what “good” looks like… and that’s basically what you’re producing.
What “The Chasm of Despair” Looks Like
O’Sullivan has a name for this dead zone. He calls it “the chasm of despair.”
If you’ve ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you know there’s a valley that comes after early competence. That’s a place where you know enough to recognize the gap between where you are and where you want to be. O’Sullivan’s chasm of despair is just there.
It’s the lighting that comes from someone who knows enough to be dangerous. The key light is where it should be. The fill ratio is fine. There’s a backlight edge. It reads as intentional because it is intentional, but the intent is simply to do the right thing rather than the interesting thing.
He says in the video that it runs into an issue of being “too perfect.”
The image is solved rather than expressed. This is where a lot of indie filmmaking lives, and most audiences (and experienced DPs) can feel it even if they can’t name it.
Be a Double Agent
According to O’Sullivan, the thing that will bump you up above average is knowing all the rules and then making a conscious choice not to follow them in a rote way.
He describes the ideal DP as a “double agent,” or someone who has absorbed the textbook and then sets it aside in service of an image that’s more alive. You know the thing to do, and you just don’t do it.
In the spec trailer he’s reviewing, the best shots work because they lean on available light like the backlit suburbia, a match, bounce from a window, rather than demonstrating lighting knowledge. The viewer stops noticing technique and focuses on story.
For more on why practicals work so well as a foundation, this piece on practical lighting is a good place to start.
Tight Framing as a Cheat (and a Skill)
One thing repeatedly flagged in the trailer is how consistently tight the shots are, and how much that choice is doing for the cinematographer.
When your frame is shallow and close, you control almost everything. The background becomes abstract. Distracting location details disappear. The light you can’t fully control becomes irrelevant.
It’s problem-solving. Tighter framing with a shallower depth of field is one of the most effective tools for a low-budget DP, and this trailer uses it well.
Where the Trailer Succeeds
The night scenes are where this spec trailer earns some great praise. The standout is a match-light shot, one O’Sullivan compares to a famous David Fincher RED camera screen test that filmmakers were recreating all over Vimeo circa 2010.
What makes it work is restraint. There’s enough ambient light to read the background, a different color temperature in the foreground, and the flame as practical doing its fair share of the heavy lifting.
Nobody blasted the room. The shot has depth, texture, and a reason to exist. That’s a lighting decision that’s interesting, which is what he’s always looking for.
The Flat Shot Problem (and an Easy Fix)
Not everything lands in the trailer. O’Sullivan points to a few interior shots that suffer from what he calls flatness. He says there’s acceptable density in the shadows and acceptable ratios, but nothing interesting is happening in the background.
His suggested fix isn’t expensive. Try a reflector angled off a window, something to catch a highlight on the back wall, anything to create a sense of depth.
There’s another close-up shot of a face that’s pretty flat, too, with no shadows to carve out the face, and a pretty monotonous color palette. He suggests a highlight for the background.
Don’t neglect that visual interest in the back of your shots! Flat images often come from solving only the foreground. Once your subject is lit, the work isn’t done. The whole frame needs a reason to exist.
As ASC award-winning cinematographer Curran Sheldon puts it in this breakdown of beginner lighting mistakes, “Light spaces, not faces.” The whole frame is your canvas.
What This Means for You
If your work is landing in the “technically correct” zone and you know it, that self-awareness is a useful diagnostic. The next step isn’t more tutorials, more lighting set-ups, more LUTs, or whatever.
It’s making a deliberate choice to understand a rule well enough to know exactly what you’re trading away when you break it. It’s developing your visual trademarks. Study the work, sure. But then put the textbook down and ask what the image needs to feel true and vibey and fun, not just correct.
The DPs whose work you actually remember aren’t the ones who lit everything by the book. Things don’t always look perfect. Interesting, talented DPs are the ones who knew the book and made a call.
