If the composition, blocking, and camera movement shapes the visual look of your film, lighting determines what the look feels like. No matter your lens choice, proper exposure, and ISO setting, a lack of understanding how to utilize light will destroy your cinematic look. A cinema-like camera will not provide a film look alone. Lighting is your most powerful ally in helping you sculpt a film look. Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC (The Deer Hunter), says that the “type of lighting we use actually creates the mood for the scene.”1
This mood is what you, as the shooter, must try to shape and capture with your camera. It helps provide visual depth to your picture. If you shoot an off-white subject against a white wall, there's not much contrast—not much light and shadow—and the picture appears flat. If you shoot somebody white against a dark background, the person stands out, and if you add background lighting to the scene, the depth increases. Because of the large sensor of DSLRs and some advanced video cameras—along with high ISO settings for DSLRs and the video camera's comparable gain settings—they maintain a strong advantage over small chip video cameras because of the capability to shoot in natural and practical low-light situations. Fewer lights are needed on set.
The quality of light refers to what it looks like and what it feels like. What it looks like is what you see on the surface. The feel, on the other hand, conveys the emotion shaped by lighting. You can craft the look and feel of a film by paying attention to:
1. | Light quality |
2. | Light direction |
3. | Light and shadow placement |
4. | Color temperature |
Craft the look and feel of a film by paying attention to:
1. Light quality
2. Light direction
3. Light and shadow placement
4. Color temperature
Hard light is direct, producing harsh shadows, and results in a high level of contrast. This can come from a sunny day or an unshaded light pointed directly at a subject. Hard lights are especially effective as backlight and rimlight sources, such as the example in Figure 2.1.
Soft light is indirect, created by reflecting or diffusing the light—an overcast day or a scrim or sheet dropped between the light source and the subject, or simply bouncing light off a white art board, or even reflecting light off a wall or ceiling. This type of light provides low contrast to the image (see Figure 2.2).
One of the counterintuitive properties of light is the fact that as the lighting instrument is brought closer to the subject, the softer the lighting gets, while farther away, the harder it is because it becomes more of a point source, causing the hard light quality to stand out. A diffused light source from farther away may convey a harder light quality than a low-watt Fresnel lamp up close.
The direction of the light will determine the placement of shadows and, consequently, the physical texture of objects and people. There are fewer shadows when the lighting is on-axis of the camera (the front). Shadows increase as the light shifts off-axis of the camera and to the rear of your subject. Light from the side will increase the texture of the scene. When lighting is “motivated,” it refers to a light from a particular source, such as a fireplace, window, lamp, or the sun. In the medium close-up of Evie Bicker in the still from Scanlan's Convergence (see Figure 2.2) shot on a Sony PMW-F3 HD video camera with a Super 35 mm sized sensor, a high three-quarter key highlights the left side of her face, while soft shadows sculpt her cheekbone with soft-quality light, the light motivated by a sunlight. Her dark clothing and well-lit face provides high contrast in the scene, making her expression stand out. (The bright pink scarf also punches the scene with color, again making her stand out in the scene.) This light was likely scrimmed providing a soft look and feel on the woman. If the scene expressed hard light and shadows a totally different feel would shape the scene. As an additional note, the saturation of color is more prominent when the source is from the front, while colors become desaturated when the lights are placed in the rear.
Light Placement Terminology
Key: The main light source of the scene (a window, a table lamp, overhead lighting, a fireplace, and so forth). Know where your motivated light source is and add lights, if needed, to reinforce it accordingly. Can be hard or soft quality.
Fill: Lights used to fill in shadows caused by the key light. Usually a soft quality.
Back and Rim: Lights placed behind characters to separate them from the background. A rim light specifically is placed high with the light falling on a character's head, her hair lit in such a way as to differentiate her from the background.
Background: Lighting occurring in the background of the set, designed to separate it from the foreground, giving the scene visual depth. These could be street lights, lights in a store, a hallway light inside, and so forth.
Following are a series of stills from a variety of DSLR and large sensor video shooters’ work, each one illustrating a different light source direction.
A side key light on the front of the face brings out the main features of the character, the emotions expressed by the face (see Figure 2.3).
Note: If you're shooting in the daytime and need to make it look dark, use blue gel filters with a high hard light (representing the moon) and desaturate the colors.
Shadows bring out drama and are essential when creating a night scene (see Figure 2.10). Related to light direction is the placement of shadows. The direction and height of the light determine how shadows fall in the cinematographer's composition. Lights from the front will minimize shadows, whereas lights from the rear will increase the amount of shadows seen on camera. The higher the light source, the shorter the shadow. If you want long shadows, shoot at sunrise or sunset, or place your lights low, instead of high, in the background. Side lighting will increase texture.
Digital sensors see lights differently than people do. Computer chips are not as smart as human perception and have a hard time adjusting precise and subtle differences in color caused by different kinds of light sources. Different chemicals burn at different wavelengths, producing different color qualities depending on whether the lamp is halogen, tungsten, fluorescent, sunlight, and so on. Also, sunlight changes its color temperature depending on the time of day and whether or not it's cloudy (see Figure 2.11). Color temperature is measured in degrees Kelvin (K).
Our eyes adjust to these varying color temperatures automatically. Indoor settings for cameras are usually set at 3200 K, whereas outdoor settings are usually at 5600 K; both of these numbers are averages for indoor tungsten lighting and outdoor daylight. Even though cameras have automatic white balance systems, the white balance setting of your camera allows you to adjust the setting manually. You may set your camera to manual mode and adjust it with a white or gray card. The Canon 5D and 7D, as well as the Panasonic Lumix GH series, include adjustable color temperatures you can select with the dial (Philip Bloom refers to this as “dialing in the color temperature”). Balancing correctly is important so that you can control your image. Sometimes you may want to experiment with color temperature as a way to change the look of the scene, but you should always control this important element of lighting (see Figure 2.12).
Color Temperature
Shane Hurlbut, ASC
You have to get the in-camera look as close as possible to the final vision for the project. It's an 8-bit color space, 4-2-0. It is compressed and that color space can be limiting. I find it is the compression that makes it look the closest to film, so embrace it. As a cinematographer, you really need to micromanage the color temperature. If you want a day exterior to feel consistent throughout a day from morning till sunset, you need to start with your color temperature so that it is consistent with that of the sun. In the morning it could be around 3400 degrees. To keep the light looking white and not orange, you will need to set your color temp at 3400 Kelvin. By midday it should be around 5200 to 5500 Kelvin. You repeat the same approach at sunset. We had a sequence in Act of Valor on a dry lake bed that posed for a landing strip in the Horn of Africa. We started before the sun came up and were there until it went behind the Sierra Nevada at around 7:45pm. I used this micromanaging approach and the image is so consistent. In the final color correction we hardly had to do any manipulation other than dialing in contrast. (Hurlbut, S. (2009, Nov. 9). Collision Conference. Video. <http://shanehurlbut.smugmug.com/Professional/CollisionConference/10137672_ia4ZS#697099091_Bqx5z-A-LB>, accessed 28.05.2010).
In addition, many of these cameras allow you to create presets for the picture look. Several DSLR shooters have mimicked the look of a variety of film stocks to create different looks as well. (See Chapter 4 for details on adjusting color temperature, as well as steps for shaping your picture style.) In addition, postproduction color grading allows you to further shape the look of your project (Philip Bloom, for example, uses Magic Bullet software to utilize color grading plug-ins to achieve his looks).
There is no one way to determine color balance. Do you balance for tungsten if you're indoors near a window, do you just go with the camera's preset (daylight, indoor, outdoor shade, and so forth), or do you dial it in? You need to look at the image and think about how it relates to the story to best determine what you need. Shane Hurlbut, ASC, dials in his color temperature by eyeballing the monitor or the camera's LCD screen and getting the look as close as he can get it before turning it over to postproduction. Others suggest using the presets for consistency depending on the lighting type you're in, and setting manual white balance only when in a mixed lighting setup (halogens, fluorescents, incandescents in one room, for example). The Canon 7D tends to go a little red when shooting indoors with the incandescent setting.
White Balance Tip
Do not manually white balance during a sunrise or sunset because you would be adjusting the nice golden flow into white, and you don't want to lose the golden glow! During the sunset scene in The Last 3 Minutes, Shane Hurlbut, ASC, dialed in his color temperature at 4700 degrees K (see Figure 2.13).
The following stills and diagrams with brief explanations show basic setups for shooting outdoor day, outdoor night, indoor day, and indoor night as tied to the idea of composition and light quality.
When shooting outdoor locations, time of day and weather are the two most important factors to consider; they determine your light source and shadows. Big-budget films may use generators with daylight lamps, but when shooting a documentary or an outdoor wedding, for example, you need to be aware of the sun's location because it will be the primary light source (see Figures 2.14 and 2.15). Mornings and afternoons tend to provide better shooting because the color temperature will provide warmer skin tones; it will also provide long shadows, so you can shape the look around this light and shadow placement. However, when shooting during the “golden hour,” you'll have less time to shoot and a bit more challenge in post to match the color temps from shot to shot (and sometimes within the shot) because the lighting is changing quickly (and thus the color temperature). In addition, to soften the quality of the light, you may want to use a scrim to remove the harshness of the light on a subject's face, or you may want to bounce light off a reflector to provide fill light.
In shaping the interior during the day, many cinematographers will use windows for short shoots (see Figure 2.18). They may add in a daylight lamp from the direction of the window on longer shoots, so as not to lose light direction when the direction of the light changes over the course of a day.
1 Fauer, J. (2008). Cinematographer Style: The Complete Interviews, Vol. 1. (p.332). American Society of Cinematographers.