The built in meter in your camera is known as a reflective light metering system,
This means that the meter evaluates the elements that you are pointing the camera
at and tries to give you the correct exposure or iris setting when you shoot.

Now basically all reflective meters are trying to find middle gray. The principal
being that if we get middle gray or middle of the exposure scale right, then the
highlights and the shadows will fall where they should.

Let’s just imagine that the light meter in your camera could talk and you pointed
your camera (while The meter is on automatic mode) toward a subject that was
overall very bright with Lots of white highlights.

The meter would say…”Ooops! this subject is far too bright for middle gray so I had better close down the iris of the lens to let less light in.”, which means you under expose the subject.

If you did the same thing and pointed the camera at something with a lot of dark
tones in it then the meter would say… “Ooops! This subject is to dark, we had
better open up the iris”. In both cases you would wind up with the wrong exposure.

Now if the whole world was middle gray, you wouldn’t have any problems with this.

The entire above situation is why professional cinematographers and still photographers for that matter often use an incident light meter. This is the one with the little ping pong type ball on it that you often see being held in front of the actor’s face.

The principle here is that an incident meter measure the light falling on the subject without regard to whether It is black or white and there-bye can give a more accurate and consistent exposure reading from the master shot to the medium shot and to the close up shot when using a single camera.

I often demonstrate this principle in my cinematography class and turn the students on to getting far better exposure while using a video camera.

I do workshops on this kind of information. Call me if you would like me to put one on in your area.

Cheers, Barry

Night for Night lighting

Had a couple of question on lighting lately, so here is something on night for night lighting. I am assuming here that some of you have at least a couple of small lighting units to work with.

The thing about night lighting is your frame basically will have more dark areas than light areas. Lighting a set for a dark mood does not mean an absence of light. It is a way of controlling the highlight and shadow areas and arranging these areas in a way that they still have a balanced composition.

Underexposing the image to give the feeling of darkness will just result in a noisy and muddy looking picture in video and a grainy image in film. You simply have to have enough exposure to pull out the detail in what you are shooting.

A very big clue to doing effective night lighting is to make very sure that you do not light from the front (at the camera position). This will destroy the mood and give your picture a very flat look.

Try to bring your light across the frame from the side and let the light beams bring out the edges of objects but keeping the front side dark.

You have seen this many times in motion pictures where a man walks into a dark warehouse and is lit only by some streaks of moonlight coming from a skylight. If you look carefully you will notice that the side closest to the camera is often very dark but the subject is rimmed or outlined by the moonlight making the scene look very real.

By the way, the blue light is simply accomplished by putting blue gel over a tungsten balanced light you light to give the effect that the light is coming from the moon. We have come to accept this in movies, though in real life you will notice the moonlight really isn’t blue but more of a chalky green/blue colour.

Points to remember:
Light from the sides not the front
Have more darkness in the frame than Lightness. Set up the areas of light and dark for a pleasing balance Don’t simply underexpose the whole image.

Try it out and let me know how it works for you.

Here’s a really effective good lighting tip called the Rembrandt
Patch It is called that because this great painter used this
technique to paint his models.

Ok, so you’re outside on a sunny day and you are making a
Video and you have a subject for your shot.

If you place your subject with the sun directly on her with the
Sun coming over your shoulder she is going to squint!! No good!

If you have the sun over her shoulder and hitting you in the face
you will find she isn’t squinting but you will probably under expose
her face unless you can bounce some light into her face to reduce
the overall contrast. (In movies we do this all the time but use
lights and reflectors to help bring down that contrast) I am
assuming you don’t have the tools that I have.

Try positioning your subject so that the sun hits her face but in
such a way that you notice a triangular patch of light under her
eye that is the furthest from the sunlight. You may have to get
hour to turn her head slightly to see the patch but you will see
it.

Think of it as a circle with your subject in the middle and the sun
light coming from somewhere between your camera and 90
degrees to your right or left.

This is the Rembrandt Patch and is the same lighting as the great
painter used on his models. The only difference being that he
used the sunlight (diffused) coming in through a window on the
north side of his studio. He chose this because the shadows would
pretty well stay the same all day as apposed to shooting on the
south side where the shadows would continually move.

YOU’RE OUT OF DAYLIGHT AND YOUR VIDEO VIEWFINDER LOOKS DARK?

This happens to all shooters. In shooting film when this happens you can switch to a faster or (more sensitive to light film stock) or you can put on some high speed lenses. (lenses with a faster aperture opening).

That extra hour of shooting can mean big savings to the producer of a feature film with 150 people on the crew but what about you with your camcorder?

The most obvious approach would be to hit the DB boost setting that a lot of cameras have. In other words instead of shooting at “0 DB” you push the button to “9 DB “ or “18 DB” or whatever your camera has for this.

The big problem here is that as you do this what you are actually doing is getting the camera to boost its sensitivity to light at the expense of a weaker video signal. (a less contrasty, less sharp and more “noisy” ,this is like grain in film image).

An extreme example here would be those shots from the gulf war showing rockets being fired at night. Remember how grainy these images were?? In this case the content far outweighs the technology.

The other things that you can do is to wait till you have more light or change the position of the camera to obtain more light or add some artificial light to the subject. Those are your choices.

Video shooting and colour issues

Previously we discussed the problems of the changing
colour of daylight and how this effects your shooting
and white balance settings on your camera.

This time I would like to deal with the subject of mixed
lighting on location.

Let’s say for a moment I am a news cameraman (my
old profession) shooting some stories or interviews on
location I someone’s house.

It’s around 11.30 in the morning and direct sunlight is
coming in through he windows. I position the person
we are interviewing so that the sunlight hits one side
of her face.

From my camera position the sunlight comes from about
90 degrees to the right of where my camera is. Now this
means that the other side of the subject is quite dark as
no sunlight is hitting this side of the face. There are a
couple of things I can do to reduce then contrast between
both sides of the face.

One thing I can do is position a large piece of white board
to the left side of the subject’s face so that it bounces the
sun light back into her face and brings up the brightness
of the dark side.

If I had some portable lights with me I could put the light on
this dark side of the face and bring up the brightness that way.
The only problem is that the portable light has a colour
temperature of around 3200 degrees Kelvin which is much
warmer than our daylight. This would mean that the colour
would look different on this side of her face.

The colour of the light from the window would be around 5800
Kelvin quite blue looking.

What I could do is put a (full blue gel) over my light that would
change the colour to match the blueish daylight on the other
side of her face. This gel made by companies such as Rosco or
Lee is called a CTB gel or (colour temperature blue.) The gel
corrects the warm light from our portable light and makes it the
same as the sunlight. At this point I could white balance my
camera which would see all the light as daylight.

Drop me a line if I can be of further help.

Cheers, Barry

It is quite common in our business when lighting a set to light the actors separate
from the set. There is good reason for this. The big one is to keep the light on the actors from casting their shadows onto the background set,

Ever notice in soap operas on TV that the actors are generally away from the walls? The director of photography can light the background set so that it looks
attractive without worrying about actor shadows as long as they are a safe distance from the set lighting.

When we light the actors, we call this the actors block. As actors move around the set during their rehearsal with the director, the DOP (Director of Photography)
watches carefully and notes where there is significant dialogue in one area or
another and then he lights these areas so that the actors have what we call ‘good modeling”. This is to say that they are lit well.

Generally speaking the softer more diffused light (we call this the fill light) comes
more or less from the camera position with the key or main lights coming from the sides.

The idea of having the sun behind you falling onto the subject in front of you when shooting outside is mostly avoided when shooting professionally outdoors.
The simple reason for this is that the picture will look very flat and uninteresting
when lit this way.

I had a really good book on this some years ago called Lighting for TV and Motion Pictures by Harry C Box. If you can still get this book I would suggest you
read it cover to cover as it is loaded with how to’s on how to achieve good lighting.

Lot’s more good tips in my “Video Bible” which you can purchase from this site.

Cheers, Barry

“Day for Night” is term we use in the film business to describe our efforts to make a daylight shot look like a night time shot. The key to doing this is as follows.

First thing is to have a sunny day, preferably with the sun lower in the sky rather than midday. Try to keep the background of the scene you are shooting darker than lighter.

Have some kind of practical (that’s a real light in the shot) light showing in the frame. This could be an outside lamp on a wall, a street light etc. This practical is a clue to the audience that it really is night time. Once again just make sure the background is dark. This is important.

You sun light should come from the back or near back of the subject. What we are attempting to do here is to convince the audience that the Sun is really the Moon. With this light coming from behind the subject, the foreground would generally be darker and this is what we want for the illusion.

If you are shooting in video you need to white balance your camera prior to setting up. Do this by balancing the camera not on a white card but rather on a pinkish or warm coloured surface. This will cause your camera’s internal set up to add more blue to the colour. (blue moonlight?? Get it?)

Now the only thing left to do is underexpose the image by closing down the lens aperture a bit and that’s it. Try it out and let me know how it worked.