Set on Long Island’s North Shore in 1976, the ensemble drama Diggers focuses on a tight-knit community held together for generations by the vocation of clam digging. Starring Paul Rudd, Lauren Ambrose and Maura Tierney and directed by Katherine Dieckmann, the modestly budgeted film from HDNet is small and personal in scope and gets its strength from its verisimilitude and strong performances. Regardless, the under-$2 million show is a period piece with a lot of exteriors and even work on boats, which gave Cinematographer Michael McDonough his fair share of challenges.

McDonough was delighted to be offered a film set in the mid-1970s because many of his favorite films and their cinematic style are products of that time period. “I love zoom lenses,” he says, “and the quality of film stocks at the time. And I love the freedom that the filmmakers had [then]. The Deerhunter’s one of my all-time favorite movies.”

Shot in the area of Long Island in which the story is set, and also on Staten Island, the production team did its best to find areas that had seen little change in the past 30 years.

McDonough credits the work of Production Designer Roshelle Berliner, who happens to be his wife, for transforming the interiors and exteriors on Diggers’ modest budget. “She was very specific,” he says. “We have this great house from the 1950s that one of the characters lives in, and this even older car. It helped make it realistic. Even though it was 1976, we wanted cars and furniture and everything to come from earlier periods, too, as they would have in real life.”

As Diggers is an HDNet project, it isn’t surprising that McDonough shot it with a Sony HDW-F900/3. The cinematographer was used to working with video as his most high-profile work had been done in the digitally-shot portions of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and in the highly lauded drug addiction indie Down to the Bone, which he shot with a PAL-version Sony DSR-PD150. Though he knew he might lose some sky to clipping in the film’s many day exteriors, he was comfortable with F900 and found the “slash 3” considerably better with highlights than previous F900 incarnations.

Though he would have preferred to work with a digital imaging technician (DIT), it was simply not possible to hire one and remain within the budget. But he was fortunate enough to be able to hire Abby Levine, one of the busiest DITs on the East Coast, for half a day during preproduction to help create some preset looks that the cinematographer could dial in during the shoot. “Abby is also a photographer, so he has a great understanding of photography in addition to all the technology,” McDonough says. “I showed him my [reference] notebook, and we came up with menu settings that gave me 95 percent of the look I wanted on the day.”

The cinematographer elaborates: “There are five potential contrast settings, and we went with the lowest contrast—the greatest range. The cameras are inherently very contrasty and saturated, and I wanted to get away from that. We went off-matrix, which gave the image a more desaturated look. Those were the major things, and then we gave it a lot of little tweaks.”

The camera also offers two “vista” settings—one to crop for 1.85:1 and one for 2.35:1 widescreen. McDonough felt strongly that the 2.35 setting cropped too much information for something that would be released theatrically. “You’re just blowing up more than I think the camera can handle,” he says. “Most of what HDNet really wants is 1.78:1 for their broadcasts and DVDs, but I composed for 1.85. It only looks the way we shot it in the film-out, though the 1.78 version is, of course, very close.”

A great deal of Diggers was shot handheld by operator Peter Agliata, with the F900 tethered to a 24-inch HD monitor when possible. McDonough and Gaffer John Woods would generally rough out lighting situations using traditional light meters and rating the camera at EI 500. Then the light meters usually returned to their cases and the monitor and waveform monitor were used to fine-tune. In situations where the full-size monitor was simply too big and heavy to be practical—on boats, for instance—the cinematographer made use of a portable monitor from Astro Systems that allowed him to switch between the picture and the waveform image.

McDonough carried a full set of Zeiss DigiPrimes and used mostly medium-range lenses. “I didn’t use the 5.5mm and the super-long lenses,” he notes, adding that he really wanted to be able to use selective focus, which isn’t always easy with cameras like the F900. “It’s hard to get a ‘cinematic’ depth of field with a 2/3-inch chip,” he says. “It really gives you about the same depth of field as Super 16mm film. I used a lot of ND filters so I could shoot wide open as much as possible. [1st AC] Eddie Rodriguez did a wonderful job pulling focus.”

The cinematographer notes that operating the camera handheld made moving around the set a bit faster—both within takes and resetting to go in for closer shots. “The water stuff was tricky,” he adds. “We did that two ways. We either had a camera boat alongside the boat with the actor, and [in the camera boat] I could keep an eye on the monitor and the scope, or we would disconnect and the operator and actor would go off and shoot. I liked the look of these shots, though I’d be curious to see what the new Makohead non-gyro stabilizing head would have been able to do on a boat. It wasn’t around [when we were shooting], but I’d really like to see what it can do.”

McDonough says he lit Diggers essentially the way he would if he had been shooting film. “I used Dedolights with hard edges, a lot of Kino Flo fixtures because they’re so easy to tuck away in a corner, and, when possible, I’d try to light interiors from outside with big HMIs through diffusion.”

He used very little filtration, save the ND and occasional polarizer outside, but made use of an old-school diffusion technique of putting a piece of stocking behind the lens. “There are extended scenes in a bar,” he says, “and the actors are smoking a lot. I like the look of a smoky bar, but I didn’t want to be working in a smoked-up environment for two and a half days, and I didn’t want the crew to have to go through that. Also, when you use real smoke, you have to wait for the smoke to be perfect [before you can start shooting] and we didn’t have time for that, so I used the stocking to approximate a smoky bar. It worked well.”

“There are always sacrifices: another lens I would like or a crane shot that never happens,” he admits. “One of my favorite moments in the film is in the bar scene—just a little moment between two characters. It’s just so well written and acted. I think it’s a great scene. So you console yourself by saying, ‘I never got the crane shot, but I did get this great moment. And that’s a nice feeling, too.”