Many videographers and cinematographers are only just now contemplating the growing world of shooting episodic work for the Web, but when Justin Talley got behind the camera for the Web series The Lake for Warner Bros.' WB.com and new media production company Generate, he was already a veteran of videography for that medium.

"It's an avenue with its own set of learning curves," Talley explains. "I was one of the first people to shoot commercial content for the Web when I shot some Verizon FiOS spots a few years ago. The ad agencies didn't really know yet how to think of Web production. We had a full ad agency staff for a project that had a production budget that was less than the catering budget. But they brought out creative directors, advertising executives and clients. It was a whole different mindset."

For Talley, the kind of work he gets to do on The Lake with director Jason Priestly is a chance to photograph episodic programming that he wouldn't have in the traditional world of television. "I'm certainly not an ASC cinematographer," he says. "I'm not even in the Local 600. The majority of my work is in indie features and commercials, and I moonlight in the video game industry. My 'TV' experience so far has all been Web TV."

Talley shot The Lake in and around the L.A. area standing in for the Midwest. He used what was then the brand-new Panasonic AG-HPX300 from Birns & Sawyer. While the show was designed to premiere on the Web, it was important to Generate that it be shot in HD in order that it could be repurposed for broadcast or Blu-ray or any other delivery system that comes down the road.

"The bonus of shooting with a professional body," Talley elaborates, "is that you can integrate standard film accessories rather than having to get the items for smaller cameras that are usually specialized for only one specific body. This camera, with its three 1/3-inch CMOS chips was the only one like it on the market and we only had a choice of three lenses."

Talley adds another advantage to shooting HD even for Web shows: "If you have a director and producers used to working in television"—which he did in this case—"if you shoot something with maybe a DVX100 in Mini DV and everyone watches your footage on the big HD screen they're used to, they'll all cringe. Even if they know it wasn't designed to be seen that big, they'll still cringe. And nobody wants that."

The resolution of the image people see on their computers will necessarily be fairly low, so it might seem intuitive that Talley wouldn't compromise one bit of his initial photographic resolution with optical filters on the lens, but the truth is exactly the opposite. He explains that this has a lot to do with what happens to the image on the way from being bigger to being smaller. "A lot of these codecs get more confused with the more variables you throw at them," he says. "And in the process, the [algorithms] are set up to make decisions about what is and isn't important in terms of sharpness and skin tone detail."

So limiting the original information, he explains, can actually help yield a better result than capturing every bit of it and letting the number crunching prepare it for the Web. "I'm not a big lover of softening filters," he says, "but I used [Tiffen] Soft/FX filters for 99 percent of The Lake."