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.