Hiking in the Italian mountains is one of those experiences that doesn’t need much help to feel cinematic but shooting it in RAW makes you notice things you’d otherwise walk straight past.

I spent a day near Valmalenco, close to one of the small mountain churches in the area, walking through two abandoned towns where you can still see traces of the people who used to live there doors left half open, furniture still in place, that particular kind of silence that only comes with places time has moved past. I’m keeping the exact location out of this one on purpose. Mass tourism isn’t something these places can handle, and part of respecting them is not turning them into a pin on a map. If you’re genuinely curious, feel free to message me directly.

What I really want to talk about here, though, is the camera.

I shot this in RED RAW, 4K at 25p, on the Nikon ZR with a 40mm lens, a Hoya ND16, and a variable ND/CPL stacked from ND2 to ND40 depending on the light. And the more I use this camera, the more obsessed I become with it. The quality it pulls out of RAW footage is honestly excessive in the best possible way, more information, more flexibility in the grade, more room to push the image exactly where I want it.

RED RAW is still a tough codec to bring into wedding work right now the bitrate is high enough that it isn’t always practical on a day with hours of continuous footage and a tight turnaround. But I think that’s about to change. Nikon has a firmware update coming for the ZR that will introduce RedLog3G10 in H.265, which should mean a real jump in quality without the same storage and processing overhead. It’ll also unlock open gate shooting with anamorphic desqueeze which is a big enough topic that it deserves its own post, so I’ll save that for next time.

This is really what this whole “Beyond Weddings” section is going to be about: the gear, the technical rabbit holes, the stuff that doesn’t fit into a wedding recap but is exactly what shapes the quality you see in every film I put out weddings included. Chasing image quality isn’t a side hobby for me. It’s the same obsession, whether I’m on a mountain alone with a camera or filming someone’s ceremony.