Seeing the Light

1. Brightness
• How much light you have affects the mood and clarity of the photograph
2. Size
   • A large source produces a soft light and shadows. The smaller the light source, the harsher the light becomes, and the more distinct the shadows are.
3. Color
• It can add to the mood and expression of a photograph, but it can also ruin an image by discoloring the subject or background.
4. Number of light sources
   • Working with multiple sources allows you to sculpt your subject.
5. Distance
• The distance from the source to the subject controls both the relative strength of the light and its relative size.
6. Direction
   • It allows you to interpret the subject in many ways. It can reveal texture or smooth details.
7. Quality:Hard, Focused or Diffuse(soft).
   • Lights can be direct or hard, focused like a spotlight, or they can be soft and diffuse.
     • Hard light:
       • produces strong, dramatic highlights and shadows unless diffused by user.
       • can be used relatively far away from the subject.
       • generally requires fill light to soften shadows and control contrast.
       • brightness and spill are fairly easy to control.
     • Soft light:
   • consists of a relatively large, indirect light source (ex-an overcast sky)
   • produces gentle, flattering highlights and shadows.
   • needs to be closer to the subject.
   • tends to spill and reduce contrast.
   • requires little or no fill light.
   • works well as fill because it does not introduce hard shadows.

Lighting Equipment Check List

You should have the following items on-hand and easily accessible during your shoot:

• 2” cloth tape—to tape down cables so that people won’t trip over them.
• Power cables and heavy-duty extension cords (25', 50', 100').
• Three-prong to two-prong adapters for older locations.
• Clothespins—used to attach lighting gels or diffusion to barndoors
  and so forth.
• Heavy work gloves—for handling light globes and hot equipment.
• Lighting gels.
• Diffusion materials.
• Reflectors.
• Bounce cards—often nothing more than a big piece of white foamcore, bounce cards can help you get more mileage out of your lights.
• Duvetine, black felt, or black garbage bags for blocking windows.
• Kino-Flo bulbs—these color temperature-corrected flicker-free light bulbs are used to replace standard fluorescent light tubes in location fixtures.
• Clamps with rubber handles(grip clips)—similar in function to clothespins, but with more grip.
• Extra light globes—650W and 1 K bulbs to go with your light kit, household bulbs in high wattages, and so forth. You should have at least one extra globe for every light in your kit.
• C-stands.
• Flags and nets.

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Safety First: Hazards of working with high-temperature movie lights

Safety First: Hazards of working with high-temperature movie lights include fire, electrocution, and physical injury. So be careful!

• When rigging lights, follow local fire and electrical codes.
• Fingerprints on lamps cause them to heat unevenly and burn out rapidly—or explode. So use gloves and eye protection when handling and replacing lamps, and make sure they are firmly seated in their sockets before switching them on.
• Avoid putting any flammable material, such as cardboard, paper, or cloth, close to a lamp, even if it's a low-wattage household bulb.
• Take the time to tape electrical lines to the floor. Tripping over cables is a major cause of accidents on the set.
• Rig silks, flags, and other gear on C-stands to distribute weight as evenly as possible. Weight the legs with sandbags to prevent tipping.
• Use grip clamps, C-47s, or heat-resistant gloves to adjust barn doors and other hot lighting components.
• All high-intensity light sources can be hazardous, but HMI lighting equipment is particularly dangerous. These lamps have a nasty tendency to explode, most often when they are switched on. Grips should warn cast members and crew before they switch on an HMI unit, and make sure no one is standing directly in front of it. Also, since part of their spectrum extends into the ultraviolet range, HMis can cause sunburn. Keep HMI lights at least several feet away from actors or interview subjects. Grips who work closely with these lights should use sunblock.
• As a general rule, no matter what kind of lights you're using, warn actors, Interview subjects, and crew before you turn on those lights, and ask them to move away from the lamps. Let lights warm up for several minutes before shooting, and keep them on to stabilize color temperature—but turn them off promptly after the last take.
• Let hot lights cool down before moving them. Never attempt to break down hot lights or put them in packing cases.
• Even though DV-style shooting encourages rapid shooting schedules, be deliberate and careful in setting and moving lights. Hurrying will cause carelessness and accidents.

Lighting Tips

Most Light is measured in terms of color temperature, which is calculkated in Degrees Kelvin(K). Indoor tungsten lights have a color temperature of 3200 degrees Kelvin, whereas daylight has an approximate color temperature of 5500 degrees Kelvin. The main thing to remember is that daylight lights are much stronger than tungsten lights; the daylight lights will overpower the tungsten lights. Flourescent lights can be anywhere from 2700 to 6500 K. Sodium vapor (streetlights) lights are yellow orange and are around 2100 K. You can use CTO(color temperature orange) or CTB(color temperature blue) to change lights back and forth between tungsten and daylght balanced. You also put gels on the windows instead of the lights. Neutral density filters cut down on the intensity of the lights, without changing the temperature.

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Main Light Categories

Excerpted from:
Choosing the Right Lighting Kit: by John Jackman

Flourescents

Fluorescents are special versions of the fixtures hanging from your office ceiling-except they've been adapted for film and video use into controllable fixtures with color-corrected tubes and high-frequency, dimmable ballasts.

Fluorescents are hugely popular these days, and for good reason. They cast a beautifully diffused soft light, use less power than incandescents do, and run cool. Shoots with a lot of incandescent lights can create a furnace-like atmosphere that requires loads of cooling and makeup repair.

Probably the foremost name in fluorescent instruments is Kino-Flo, a company that began making specialized fluorescent instruments for film in the late 80s, when fluorescent was a bad word in the trade. At that time, fluorescents were bad for video because they tended to give pictures a sick, greenish tint. They were even worse for film because the 60Hz flicker of the bulbs showed up on 24fps film as an obnoxious pulsing. Kino-Flo made their own color-balanced tubes and used special high-frequency ballasts that overcame the problems.

The use of special color-balanced tubes allows you to mix the fluorescents with quartz lights or HMIs without gel correction.

HMI

HMI (Hydrargyrum Medium-Arc Iodine) lights are actually the modern and more portable version of the arc light, and are valued because they throw off an extremely high light level at the same color temperature as sunlight.

They run off of very high voltage, so you still have to drag around a heavy power supply-although these power supplies have gotten much smaller and lighter recently. Some even run off batteries.

The advantage of HMIs is that they generate a pure, intense white light that closely matches the quality of sunlight. They are available in a huge variety of sizes and wattages, ranging from the tiny Joker-Bug 150 to behemoths like the LTM Super 12/18kW (kilowatt) HMI with its 24-inch fresnel lens. They are available in open-face PAR configurations.

Portable HMI kits usually consist of a single instrument with a fitted case, power supply, stand, and accessories.

Soft lights

Soft lights are designed to throw soft, diffused light. The lights range from traditional instruments with attached soft boxes (like the Chimera Softbank) to radically different, specially designed instruments such as the Bogen Aurasoft or the De Sisti Wyeth. The range is really huge. As with fluorescents, soft lights are commonly used in conjunction with open-face lights or fresnels. Several manufacturers sell kits that include a soft box or dedicated soft light combined with fresnels or open-face lights.GO TO THE TOP

Lensed instruments

Lensed instruments use a special lens in front of the lamp to control the spread of the light beam. The major categories of lensed instruments are fresnels and PARs. Fresnels use an efficient stepped lens to focus the beam. Fresnels can range in size and price from tiny 100W (watt) models to the 5000W Mole Senior Solarspot.

Fresnels are the mainstay of video and film lighting because of their flexibility. They can be adjusted to throw a wide flood beam or a narrow, hard spotlight. Nearly every lighting manufacturer has a line of fresnels, ranging from the Lowel Fren-L to the popular LTM Peppers.

Many of the kits sold by different manufacturers are built around two or three fresnels with some variation of soft light. It's pretty common to use a mix of two stronger instruments with a lower-power instrument to use as fill in a typical three-point lighting setup.

PAR (parabolic aluminized reflector) lights are fairly simple fixtures that use a self-contained bulb and reflector assembly. An old-fashioned car headlamp is an example of a PAR bulb, as are the bulbs used in common outdoor floodlights. The type of lens on the bulb determines the pattern and throw of the beam, which is not adjustable. Many PAR instruments now have separate interchangeable lenses.

Open face

Open-face instruments consist of a bulb and a reflector, and depend on the characteristics of the reflector to focus the beam. Open-face instruments can range from an inexpensive Smith-Victor photoflood to more expensive instruments such as the ArriLite. Most of Lowel's instruments, from the V-Lite and Tota-Lite to the Omni-Lite and Lowel DP, are open-face instruments. Some can be focused, and come with barn doors and similar light controls. Others are very limited in the amount of control.

Instruments such as the Lowel Tota-Lite are very inexpensive floods that can light large areas easily. The Lowel Omni-Lite or Lowel DP can be focused and have Lowel's clever, multipart barn doors for control. Open-face instruments generally have the advantage of being much less expensive than their lensed counterparts.

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Lighting for Blue and Green Screen

Choose your compositing software before you shoot.
Different apps have different needs.

Place your subject as far from the blue/green background as possible.
This will help you avoid spill-reflective blue light bouncing of the blue screen and onto the back of your actor, resulting in a bluish backlight. this can make it hard to pull a clean matte later. If you can't avoid blue spill, try to make up for it by adding a hotter orange back light to cancel it out.

Light your subject and the background separately.
This will help avoid spill.

Light to minimize video noise.
Video noise can make pulling a matte difficult. Use enough lighting and disable automatic gain if possible.

Try to make sure the blue/green screen is evenly lit, so the blue or green tones are as close as possible throughout the background.
A spot meter can come in handy.

Avoid blue or green in your subject/foreground.

Dress the floor.
If the actors feet are in the shot, it will be easier to dress the floor with something like carpeting rather than attempting to composite it later.

Screen correction shots.
Most compositing software apps use a screen correction shot to make creating a matte easier. Either before or after each take, get a few seconds of footage of the empty blue/green screen with the same framing of the action.

Pay attention to shadows.
Shadows can tend toward blue, which can make creating a matte difficult.

Light to match your CGI material.
If your going to be compositing live action and CGI environments, be sure the live-action lighting matches the CGI environment lighting. If your digital background has an orange hue, it will look strange if your subject is lit with a blue backlight.

Grip and Lighting Equipment

MSE Grip Griptionary

Mole Richardson: Lighting Manufacturer

Arri:Lighting and camera equipment

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