2 Essential Lighting Techniques

When we light an image or scene, we're usually focused on adding light. But by adding light, we can create situations where we lose control of our image. And there's a few ways we can gain back that control, to create depth and the feeling we want in our scene. Shooting in natural light is a great way to understand how and why we often need to control light. Our subject is stood outdoors, in a garden, on an overcast day. Since we have a large soft light source overhead, the sky, and other elements in the area reflecting light, like this lighter wall, the light on his face is pretty flat, with light coming from multiple directions. Since we already have more than enough light, all we need to do is take some away to gain some control over this situation. In this case, we set up a flag. These are usually made of black material, designed to block and absorb light. And here, we're using a 4x4 floppy, which means our flag can extend in size, allowing us to cover more space and block light from different angles. We call this reduction of light on the face negative fill, and it was particularly useful for this close-up, since we could block light from the wall and higher up in the sky. Without any control, we're stuck with a flat image. With a simple flag, we create depth, mood, and intent. And the same goes for indoors with natural light. We may want to shape some of the light spilling in through the windows. This can be as simple as shutting some doors and closing some curtains, like we did here, just outside the room. Since the curtains didn't block as much light as we would have liked, we placed some darker material on top of them. Inside the bathroom, to prevent bounce from the lighter walls, we clipped some more black material to a boom arm behind the door, and even covered a small corner on the opposite side of the doorway, to cut as much light reflecting onto our subject as possible. Without any lights, or even expensive equipment, we just used the house itself and some dark materials to control the natural light in the image, creating negative fill in all the places we needed it. And the cut to a close-up would be very simple while maintaining this dark look, by taking the black material we hung on a boom arm earlier, and covering the whole side of the bathroom behind camera with it. This controls the rest of the light in the bathroom, reduces the shadow levels on the face, and matches up with the previous shot. But flags aren't just the negative fill. Here, we have a soft daylight source lighting our subject, with a nanolight pavobulb in the background lampshade, set to a matching temperature. By warming up our white balance, we create a feeling of a nighttime interior. But what does this have to do with flags? Well, this is actually lit by natural daylight through a large window. We cut some of this light with the existing curtains, and softened it with a sheet of diffusion. But the spill from a window this large doesn't quite connect with the lamp, which is what we'd like to be motivating. So we hung, wedged, and clipped the flag and some black material scraps we had on hand to cut this daylight into a smaller window, shaping the light more toward the face, and better connecting with the lamp in the background. So we can see how useful controlling natural light with dark surfaces can be, but we can also control our own lights with these tools. We used a lampshade and pavobulb 10C once again to form the basis of our scene. We then used a pavoslim 240C softbox attached to light our subject and motivate the lamp, set to similar color temperatures. This looks very dramatic, which we may like, but if we feel that the contrast on our subject is a little too much, our only option is to add more light. So we put up a 4x4 frame of bleached muslin and fired a Nanlite FC60B into it, again set to a similar color temperature of our other lights to match. This has definitely reduced contrast on our subject. In fact, it's probably reduced it a little too much as we did like the dramatic look from before. We're also starting to notice some other undesirable side effects of our lighting. The arm and face are lit to around the same exposure, which is a little distracting if the face is supposed to be our focus. The front of the sofa is lit, which takes away from the illusion of just the lamp lighting our scene. Our 240C is flaring into the camera lens, which also brings subtle attention to the fact that the scene is being lit artificially. And the combined exposure of our light sources have brightened this section of wall, which is not only distracting from the face, but it's also brighter than the wall bright by the lamp, which doesn't make much sense. Now, it might seem like we've added too much light to the scene and need to take a step back. But actually, we can take inspiration from our natural light examples to fix these issues by controlling the light. First off, we can add a grid. Grids, also known as egg crate grids, simply attach to softboxes to control some of their spill, and our 240C comes with its own. The main thing the grid has given us is a reduction in exposure on the back wall. You can see how much more our subject stands out. Now we've added some control to our softbox. We haven't really made too much difference to this side of the frame though. We still have flaring and a little too much light on the sofa and arm. Luckily, we have smaller flags that can cut light more precisely, like this 24 by 36 inch flag gripped lower to the floor and placed in front of the lower section of our gridded softbox. This has cut enough light from the 240C to shape it into the places we want it, reducing light on the arm and on the sofa. Now our light aligns more with the lamp. It's much more conceivable that the lamp is lighting less of our subject's arm since there's a sofa in the way and more of the face which is directly in its path. And since the face is now slightly brighter than the arm, we're less likely to be distracted from it. We still have the flare in the corner and we're going to do something a little DIY to fix it. Another place we can find flags is on a matte box, but unfortunately our matte box only has a top flag and not the side flags we'd need to fix the flare. So we took a tiny 4 by 14 inch finger flag and clipped it to our matte box using a small spring clamp to block the light from hitting the lens. On closer inspection, we can see this flare was affecting the image even more than we thought, lowering the contrast slightly across most of the image. Now this is fixed, we did quite like the dramatic feeling of the image lit with one light and it's actually possible to bring some of that feeling back with some negative fill. Our black material from earlier clipped to a boom arm and raised against the wall on the side of our subject closest to the camera and we reduce a lot of the light bouncing from the walls, lowering the exposure on the shadow side of his face. This is how we get some of the mood back from the original one light setup and if we compare, we can see that we've managed to add an entire 4 by 4 light source to our scene, wrapping the light around our subject better and achieving our desired look whilst barely affecting the rest of the scene. This is because we've gained an understanding of light control using flags and negative fill in some natural light scenarios and apply these practices to our own lighting setup. By treating our light the same way we would treat natural light, we better understand how to control it, improving our understanding of light in general and what it can do for our image when lighting for cinema.