For cinematographer Kent Nason, the simpler the gear, the better. Although Nason has shot tv dramas and features, most of his 30 years in the business have been spent working in documentary. ‘And in documentary,’ he says, ‘you’re trying to be invisible.’

He remembers a striking moment from a shoot in Pakistan with director Barbara Doran for a film called Voices of Change: ‘We were filming a meeting with the lawyer for a boy who’d been sentenced to death for writing anti-Islamic slogans on walls. We got so close that I was essentially laying the camera on the lawyer’s shoulder and just shooting without her flinching.’

Nason, a freelance cinematographer who lives on St. Margaret’s Bay, near Halifax, got his start back in 1969. Fresh out of high school in his native New Brunswick, he headed to Montreal hoping to launch a career as a stills photographer. He became enraptured by documentary while sharing an apartment with the head of the McGill Film Society and sneaking into lectures by documentary pioneer John Grierson. Soon after, he landed a job at the now-defunct Crawley Films, which had a reputation for giving up-and-comers a break.

In 1973, Nason joined the National Film Board, where he remained a staffer until cutbacks eliminated the camera department in the mid-’90s. While at the nfb, he won a cinematography Gemini for his work on Gwynne Dyer’s The Human Race series. Last year, Loyalties, a one-hour documentary he shot about two women whose search for their roots turns up a shocking connection, won the Canada Award at the Geminis.

During the last couple of years, Nason has shot in Super 16, digital Betacam, mini-dv and hd. He says it would be nice to own his own cameras, but the number of formats makes that impractical.

‘I have a Sony DSR-300, which is a great little camera, but owning any other camera for me would be a waste of money,’ he says. He chose the DSR-300 because it was small and gives smpte time code. ‘It’s like a mini digital Betacam, with a robust tape system, proper time code and proper mike inputs. And it seemed to be the one that would hopefully cause the fewest glitches in post-production.’

Nason has just wrapped Learning Peace, a Triad Films/nfb coproduction on classroom and schoolyard violence. The DSR-300 came in handy for shooting in hallways, and so did a little monitor sound man Arthur McKay turned up with one day.

‘In a cinema verite grab-and-shoot you don’t think of a monitor being around. But Art turned up with a jvc LT-V18U, a tiny liquid crystal monitor with a screen 1.8 inches across. So whenever I was wondering what the color or lighting was like, I could just lean over and take a look. I have my own monitor, but I’d never used such a tiny liquid crystal one before.’

Nason often finds himself shooting with minimal light, which is where small fluorescents come in handy. For Lost, a 1999 nfb production, he shot a search for lost hunters in the woods late at night using a small battery-powered fluorescent hanging around his neck. His favorite portable fluorescent lights are made by Kino Flo.

‘They can be used with fluorescents, tungsten or daylight, so it’s easy to mix light,’ he says. ‘The quality of the light is very soft and flattering. Many times it can replace bouncing a light off a white piece of foam core. You just put one of these Kino Flos in the same place.’

When Nason started out in the business, doing a sync sound sequence was a major accomplishment. Today, he says, ‘a four-year-old child can do a sync sound interview.’ But while better technology has made life easier for dops, Nason says his favorite tools are the same as they have been for years: ‘a Swiss Army knife, a roll of camera tape and a good lens.’ *