Light Control and Lighting for Shadows.
Had a REALLY technical shoot a couple weeks ago. Wanted to explain (mostly through pictures and short explanations) how I did it! Hold on tight this one is going to be fun!
Our subject is U of L History Prof Janay Nugent who was awesome in front of the camera and had great patience for the time it took to dial things in!
Dr. Nugent works with some pretty cool old scripture so the plan was to put some of it up on the projector and shoot her through some students as if she was teaching. Sounds simple enough right?? Nope!
First thing is the projector. Not a lot of light, so lets see where we’re at, cause I know I’ll have to match that. (Protip- Double check in the projector menus that the bulb brightness is cranked – can be worth 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop sometimes!)
OK so I guessed at the exposure – This is 200/2.8/60th. Not bad, but I’d like to be dragging the shutter a little less because we’ll have Dr. Nugent gesturing and moving. I also blew the screen a BIT here, so I’m going to go down a third of a stop, and bump my shutter speed at the same time. 1 Stop up in ISO.
Looks Good. Thats 400/2.8/100th. Thats a good place to start. Next we have to light our subject. Biggest problem is going to be preventing spill here. The minute we spill any light on to the screen, the whole thing falls apart. There’s going to be a LOT of gridding going on! I was planning gridded octa camera left for the key, and a gridded, un-modified head for the fill. I set them both up farther to the side of the subject than I normally do. Janay was also a bit too short for the composition I wanted. Easy Fix:
You can see I also feathered the key even farther away from her and toward the camera a bit to make sure we didn’t hit the screen! So we got the key dialed. Lets make sure we get the ratio right for the fill. I always tend to shoot on-axis frames checking ratios-
Looks pretty good to me! It’ll be a bit flat, but we can’t afford to spill onto the screen. Lastly, we had to get a couple “students” in the shot. I didn’t want them to be the focus, but I wanted them to be noticeable. Whenever you want to light something to appear dark, the way to do it is not to underexpose in a normal lighting setup, but to light the opposite side of the subject you want to look dark. I placed a third light up at the front of the classroom, and Fired it back towards the “students.”
Works on the chair, should work on people! We have just enough of a rim to bring the shape of the subject, but enough dark that we don’t draw too much attention to them. Perfect.
Yup! Perfect! Here’s how we got there:
Rim for the "students" and Janay's Fill-Light.
Key. See how the fill shadow is BESIDE the screen? Perfect. No Spill!
And the whole setup:
Final Frame Looked Like This!
STOKED!
More to come 