Relaying Light: Using Diffusion to “Fix” Natural Light by Art Adams

[Chris Medico]

I would like to see any setup photos you can take Charles.

[Craig Chartier]

Charles

I would love to see some BTS setup shots if you have a moment to grab some stills.


John I might have missed it, but I didn't see what type of camera your using. and what level of post tools your comfortable with. As Charles mentioned in the "old Days" we had 2x2 swatch books from Lee Gels. and we would "push " color temps in order to arrive at a look that we wanted in camera. Certainly with cameras shooting Raw, and its appearing that the 5DIII will be doing this shortly as well with ML, Its far less of an issue on location to get color temp correct. It is however very important to get the exposure dialed in.

Do you have a good light meter? If not do you have a good I phone? there are several apps that will allow for very good light meter readings using the phones camera. I think the best app out right now is by Adam Wilt.

[Charles Papert]

Ha, thanks Craig on the 2x2 swatches, I forgot about that book. After wrestling a little with those (fine for round sunshades, not great with matteboxes and wide lenses) I had one of my gaffers make up a packet of 6x6 swatches of CTO, CTB, plus and minus green flavors, which was much easier to wrangle.

I remember one corporate job where I was struggling so much to make the headshots more interesting, I decided to gel all of my foreground lights on the subject with "shifted" looks and white balance them back to normal, which made the background go interesting colors. Such as: full and 3/4 CTO on the subject, once corrected making the office behind them very blue, or magenta on the subject making the background green. It was pretty interesting. I recall one or two of them requiring building a box of flags on all sides of the subject to keep the fluorescent spill out.

[Charles Papert]

We shot the car scene yesterday, although it moved from day exterior to warehouse interior (standing in for a parking garage). And I managed to forget to take any pictures! But I can at least describe what I used: an M40 (Arri 4K) pushed into a 12x12 bleached muslin bounce in front of the car, with 1/4 minusgreen on the windshield to take out the green. An M18 (1.8K) through a 4x4 frame of 216, roughly 45 degrees from the front of the car and 15 feet away, as a rim light. Two cameras shooting through the side window, getting a two shot and a single. Flipped everything around for the other side. This was meant to look a bit stylized so the rim light worked on both sides. No fill from the rear, so it went quite contrasty. Shooting stop was around a T4 at 400 EI. Theoretically we could have shot this at a T2.8 at 800, which of course would have required 1/4 the light level and thus smaller units, but I wanted to overpower the ambience so the backgrounds seen through the window would be at a lower level to suggest the murkiness of a parking garage (the warehouse had lots of ambient light from glass skylights).