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Help! Wacky lighting situation.
I need advice. I have a shoot in a few days at a grade school. I will be jumping between three classrooms and shooting the kids and teachers interacting in a natural setting. I was just informed by my client that I can’t use lights, and because I just found out it was three rooms, I dont have enough ND to cover all of the windows. I am guessing that the lighting will be a mix of daylight via the windows and fluorescent overheads.
Any one have any bright ideas on how to deal with this type of lighting inviroment? Is this a case of “it is what it is”? I pride myself on my lighting skills but this one has me stumped.
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6 Replies
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Mike,
They saved you a lot of work by dictating that there be no artificial lighting! If that’s really the case, you really have two choices; flood the room with the daylight from the windows, leave the fluorescents on and white balance. Then try and favor your shots away from the windows, in other words , place the camera near the windows and shoot inwards. The other coice (if you must shoot in every direction, is to use the blinds to minimize the windows and white balance in the flurescents and shoot away.
If you have a budget, another alternative is to switch out the tubes in the flurescents with photo quality (color) daylight tubes; this way the shaddow detail will have the proper color if you mix the daylight and the practical light.
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Thanks for your reply John. I never thought of switching out the tubes. I love the idea but we don’t have the budget. Is there a color temp solution for the flurescents using gels? I always thought that flurescents differ too much in color from tube to tube too corect using gel. Is that corect?
As of now it looks like I will have my back to the windows. The good news is that the producer for this is also the editor and he is going to be on site. So at lease he will know what’s in store when it comes time to color corect in post.
-Mike
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Mike,
Gels are not really a good solution, mainly because determining the exact flavor is difficult (trial and error), applying them is no fun and they cut the amount of output from the tubes which is already low. In video, you have a powerful tool in the white balance function which saves a lot of work!
If anything, when you white balance you are effectively adding minus green (which is magenta) and this doesn’t really hurt the daylight, it just makes it a little warmer!
JS
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Gelling tubes is a big maybe…
how many are there?
how high is the ceiling?
are there different types mixed together?Can you do a scout to check this out? If you can ascertain the type of tubes and if it’s not too difficult and if you can afford it then gell the tubes. If you can’t then you can’t. It ain’t brain surgery, nobody will die of there’s a bit of green in the shadows.
One other idea…if the flo’s are particularly offensive, consider turning them off! This will depend on the width of the room. It may very well get too dark on the other side but it’s worth considering.
One more…plan your time of day to avoid direct sunlight coming in through the windows.
Enjoy
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Before you give up on replacing the tubes, you might look into just renting them. Our local grip/electric place charges $5 a day and will give you a break on large orders. We did a similar shoot and rented about a dozen daylight tubes which we placed in the area that needed to be lit and left the rest of the overheads off. It was time consuming to mess with the overhead lights, but our whole lighting package was $50 for the day.
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or you could try convincing the client that it should be shot black and white, and you won’t charge extra….
— Bob C.
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