What is Cinematography?

Before I start actually posting lessons about cinematography, it would help if we knew what Cinematography is. Cinematography comes from the Greek roots kinema, which means "motion", and graphein "to record". Put it together, and the result is "To record motion". So what does a cinematographer actually do? Well, Blain Brown, author of the book Cinematography: Theory And Practice says the following: "At the heart of it, filmmaking is shooting- but cinematography is more than the mere act of photography. It is the process of taking ideas, words, actions, emotional subtext, tone, and all other forms of nonverbal communication and rendering them in visual terms". What a Cinematographer does is take a story and makes it look so realistic that you can't help but be absorbed into the movie. However, you can't simply hold a camera and hope that a movie will come out of it.  There are a lot of factors that go into making a good film, and again in the words of Blain Brown: "... everything in visual storytelling is interrelated: the sets might be fantastic, but if the lighting is terrible, then the end result will be substandard".