Behind the
Camera
Lights, Camera, Action!
Opinion by Bill Johns
Lights,
Camera, Action!
You’ll notice the first variable in the famous phrase is Lights. Then Camera, then Action. Often times the difference between a home movie and a film, is in the lighting. It is a very, very rare thing for the lighting in a scene to be just fine the way it is. Most all of the time you need supplemental lighting. The reason is simple; a CCD or even film for that matter, has nowhere near the ASA (speed) of the human eye. Even the Low-Life, er I mean Low-Light cameras can only give you pictures in dark rooms at the expense of color saturation and grain. The less light, the less color and more grain.
Now you may ask immediately, “What if I want it to look like a darkened room?” Well, you need more light…. I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but hear me out. Watch any good movie and in the night scenes you’ll see light streaking from behind, from the sides and from some softer light in the front. If you were on the set it would look really bright and you would think, “Gee, I thought this was supposed to be a night shot”. On one of the last films I shot, I went back and forth with the director. He kept saying, “It’s too bright, It’s too bright!” It took watching the dailies to convince him that I knew what I was doing. It’s all about exposure and if you have a brightly lit scene, you simply close down the F-stop to make it dark. Our eyes can’t do that, they have a built in auto-iris, and in fact, they also have built-in auto-regioning neutral density filters. (Did I lose ya?) That simply means our eyes can selectively decrease the light level from any source in a scene (remember the spots in your eyes when you look at something bright? That’s happening all the time but to lessor degrees with lessor lights) However film and video do not have those capabilities. They can only get brighter or darker and since they don’t automatically lighten and darken the areas of the scene that need it, you have to do it by painting with light. Look at the series below and suddenly all this gobbledygook will make sense… I hope.
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| Normal overhead room light; notice overly bright candle and shadows under my eyes. | 500 watt light with amber gel at left gives illusion of light from the candle and 500 watt light with ½ blue gel at right adds drama while 50 watt overhead light highlights what little hair I have left. |
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| Low-Light Camera. Overhead is turned way down and candle provides most of the light. Notice increased grain and muddy colors. | Still 500 watt with blue gel at right, but now 50 watt is sitting on the table just outside of camera range. It illuminates the face and candle and since it’s so close, the f-stop had to be turned down and that made the background go black for a very dramatic ‘candlelit’ scene. |