Ever real­ize why the videos you shot with your sonys or cell­phones does not look even close to what you see on screen, say your favorite tv-show, like house?

Hollywood movies, or higher bud­geted pro­duc­tion uses a 35-mm video cam­era, whereas your stan­dard video’s sen­sor size (film size) is about the size of your fin­ger­tips. So why such a huge difference?

The larger the size of the sen­sor (film) the big­ger the depth-of-field (put your fin­ger a cou­ple of inches between your eyes, and try focus­ing to your fin­ger tips) the blurred area behind your fin­ger is what’s called the cir­cle of con­fu­sion resulted from your focused sub­ject closer to your eye. This phe­nom­e­non, has an appro­pri­ately coined japan­ese term “bokeh” that sim­ply means that blurry effect pro­duced by lenses.

Recently we see the rise of HD qual­ity video cap­tur­ing from a dig­i­tal SLR (Canon 5D Mark II, Nikon D700 and a few oth­ers lead the way), given such fea­ture, paired with dSLR’s exten­sive lens col­lec­tion, we can pro­duce Hollywood look­ing movies from our own backyard.

Here’s a fine exam­ple by one Philip Bloom. Shot in avail­able light with a Canon 5D Mark II paired with a Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 lens over a cou­ple of nights, the fol­low­ing is what came out straight from the cam­era. All shot was cap­tured hand­held using the Z-Finder from Zacuto to give the cam­era a proper video friendly viewfinder and stability.

Head over to Philip’s Blog for behind the scene shot & full HD video download.