2024 Emmys: How 28 Directors of Photography Shot the Best Shows on TV

Voting is now underway for the 2024 Emmy nominees, which provides the IndieWire Craft team with a fantastic excuse to reach out to nominated cinematographers about how, precisely, they created such striking, transporting, and/or involving visuals on screens of all sizes.

We asked directors of photography nominated for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series (One Hour), Single-Camera Series (Half-Hour), Multi-Camera Series (Half-Hour), Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, Reality Program, and Nonfiction Program about the cameras and lenses they chose to use. As ever, though, we wanted to know how those technical choices informed the look of the shows, what they made possible in the shooting, and how they set their series up for success.

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The responses we received demonstrate how different the demands and perspectives of different series — and different formats — are. Multi-cam series are an art form unto themselves, needing to find a balanced look across four different cameras that all still have their own jobs; almost all the nominated cinematographers for multi-camera series used Sony F55 cameras (with one Sony Venice), but what they stressed and the ways they put those cameras to work are as varied as the series.

There was huge variation in formats among limited series, hour-long and half-hour series, as aspect ratios and film types increasingly transport shows back and forth through time, or simply squeeze their characters into more constrained circumstances — emotional or otherwise. Meanwhile, reality and nonfiction programs tackled the challenges of capturing the “real” with an appropriate sense of visual scope. Whether that meant trying to be intimate or invisible or joined at the hip to the action, the nominated shows demonstrated all kinds of creative ways to be in the right place at the right time, and with the right point of view.

In the list below, read about the myriad creative decisions and tradeoffs the nominated cinematographers considered in order to pick “the right tools for the job.”

The nominees’ answers are organized alphabetically by series title. 

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