Categories
Pages

Know Your Lights: Incandescent/Tungsten (Article/Tips)

Posted by on Jun 5, 2017 in Articles, Behind-the-Scenes, Featured, Industry, Lighting Tutorials, Lighting/Gaffing, Tips, Tutorials, Walk Throughs | 0 comments

Following on from my ‘Know Your Lights’ overview, today I’ll look in more detail at the first category of lamps and the various units available and when you might use them.

And that first category is incandescent lighting, commonly known as tungsten. It is the oldest, simplest and most robust lighting technology. Tungsten lamps are the cheapest to hire, the easiest to repair, and emit a smoother spectrum of light than any other artificial sources, making for the most natural skin tones. For my money, there’s no better way to artificially light a human face than by bouncing a tungsten source off polyboard.

Read More

Know Your Lights: An Overview (Article/Tips)

Posted by on Apr 17, 2017 in Articles, Behind-the-Scenes, Featured, Industry, Lighting Tutorials, Lighting/Gaffing, Tips, Tutorials, Walk Throughs | 0 comments

From time to time I help out my friend Kate Madison shooting show reels for actors. The fun and the challenge is in creating and lighting little micro-sets to capture angles that look like they might be lifted out of a scene from a much larger production, all with limited equipment.

Read More

Tiny Illumination: Lighting Micro-sets (Article/Tutorial)

Posted by on Apr 3, 2017 in Articles, Behind-the-Scenes, Featured, Industry, Lighting Tutorials, Lighting/Gaffing, Tips, Tutorials, Walk Throughs | 0 comments

From time to time I help out my friend Kate Madison shooting show reels for actors. The fun and the challenge is in creating and lighting little micro-sets to capture angles that look like they might be lifted out of a scene from a much larger production, all with limited equipment.

Read More

Candlelight: Lighting The Old World (Article/Tutorial)

Posted by on Mar 27, 2017 in Articles, Behind-the-Scenes, Featured, Industry, Lighting Tutorials, Lighting/Gaffing, Tips, Tutorials, Walk Throughs | 0 comments

The First Musketeer – the period web series I DPed in France in 2013 – gave me one of the biggest challenges in simulating candlelight. Almost every scene had candles in it (albeit fake, yet very convincing, LED ones) and it was always a struggle to make them appear to be shedding authentic light.

Read More

Real Light: 5 Tips for Working with Practicals (Article/Tutorial)

Posted by on Mar 20, 2017 in Articles, Behind-the-Scenes, Featured, Industry, Lighting Tutorials, Lighting/Gaffing, Tips, Tutorials, Walk Throughs | 0 comments

As the sensitivity and dynamic range of cameras has increased, practicals have become a more and more important and popular tool in the cinematographer’s arsenal. A practical is any light source that appears in the frame. It could be a fluorescent strip-light, a table lamp, car headlights, candles, a fireplace, an iPad, fairy lights, street lamps, a torch, a security light… any light that could be realistically found in the place where your scene is set.

Read More

Serving Hard Light: 5 Ways to Light Through a Window (Article/Tutorial)

Posted by on Feb 27, 2017 in Articles, Behind-the-Scenes, Featured, Lighting Tutorials, Lighting/Gaffing, Tips, Tutorials, Walk Throughs | 0 comments

The first step in lighting a daytime interior scene is almost always to blast a light through the window. Sometimes soft light is the right choice for this, but unless you’re on a big production you simply may not have the huge units and generators necessary to bounce light and still have a reasonable amount of it coming through the window. So in low budget land, hard light is usually the way we have to go.

Read More