Creativity is a tremendously hard thing to quantify, and yet producers and directors want to know what they’re getting before they buy it. They want to see that a DP can do one or two things really well, and then they feel confident that a DP they haven’t worked with before can definitely deliver. That’s why tabletop DPs get stuck doing lots of tabletop, or visual effects DPs shoot lots of green screen and background plates: they can show that they do that really well, so that’s what they’ll be hired to do.

Television shows with strong compositions were my earliest influences, and I’m happy to say that there’s one show on “TV” right now whose compositions move me the way my early influences did: Netflix’s House of Cards. There’s a shot in…