How do I light Interior Interviews with mixed lighting?

[John Sharaf]

Hi Patrick,

As you’ve proved already to yourself, keeping all the source color temperatures is the key to avoiding a mss match between the foreground and the background

One simple solution is to use the same tubes that are in the practical overhead lights in a 4′ kino flo instrument and then wb on that. We often refer to this as “poisoning” the light.

Alternatively but never as foolproof is to add green gel to your key light in order to match the “ambience” created by the overhead fluorescents, but it’s still pretty much trial and error in determining whether 1/4, 1/2 or full Plus Green gel is the appropriate amount.

If this is something you do all the time, investing in a 4′ Kino 4Bank is a really good solution

JMHO

JS

[Todd Terry]

You don’t sound amateur, at least you are asking the right questions.

You’ll want to go with your predominant source… or the one you can’t change… as your guide for color temperature. Since you can’t change the color of daylight (and gelling that many windows would be a nightmare), you should think of something in the 5600°K neighborhood as your “target.” Ergo, try to match the lighting on your subject with more or less the same temperature. I would have cooled down the LED fixtures (raised the temp) to match that. As you said, you found color grading easy when you did that, and that was the right choice. The ceiling flos are always going to be an issue. Of course it depends on what tubes are in there… in the “olden days” you could bet on the flo tubes to be quite cool… which would be a good thing, since their temps would be more on the daylight end of things. These days though you’ll just as often find very warm tubes (such as here in my office right now), and that’s going to prove more problematic. If I am on a location with flos, I will generally turn them all off and light the room myself. Cheap consumer flo tubes are always going to have a bit of that sickly greenish/yellow spike in their spectrums, no matter what color temp the tubes claim to be.

I believe you actually posted the same picture twice in your samples there (I certainly can’t see any difference, and they have the same file name)… but whichever that one was, you did a fine job with it, I don’t see any cringe-worthy issues at all… the grading actually looks pretty good… the focus, on the other hand… hmmm… but maybe that was just a test shot.

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Patrick Corr]

Sorry, this was the second image where I didn’t have any issues! I can’t seem to edit my post above:

Thank you so much!

[Patrick Corr]

Todd thank you very much! I do need to invest in more powerful LED setup, I just have an Ikan Rayden (3200K-5600K) LED and it’s quite small so probably only for fill light rather than a key!

[Todd Terry]

I know it was probably a grading nightmare, but I actually greatly prefer the lighting on the guy in the lab.. it just looks much more natural.

The guy in the workshop there isn’t bad, certainly not temperature wise, but it’s not as interesting as the other, by a long shot. A back/rim/hair/side light on him would have been helpful, to help pop him out of that bland particle-board background. Also, your key on him is a bit backwards from what most people would consider “normal” portrait style lighting… you’d more often see the key on the other side of the camera (more lighting the opposite side of his face), but that’s not a hard and fast rule. If you want him to appear illuminated from some natural source (say, we’re assuming that workshop has a window to the guy’s left), then that’s the appropriate side… but at first blush it’s just not aesthetically the best look for him in an interview-type setup (as opposed to some narrative work, a scene from a movie or whatever)… where normally your subject would face toward the side the key is on rather than away from it.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Patrick Corr]

I totally agree! Normally I would have lit the subject from his hard left, but I was in a very cramped kitchen in New Mexico and there wasn’t ample space to do so, while also getting in those nice reds in the background. I think I was trying to get nice depth of field but not shoot against the window that was in the top right corner as it was blown out!

I haven’t been doing this for long (maybe only a year doing proper equipment for corporate shoots) so I do struggle when I have to make snap decisions under difficult time constraints when I don’t have time to really plan out locations!

[Patrick Corr]

Thank you John – that sounds complicated! I’m still learning ☺

Thanks for your reply – do you mean matching the 4′ Kino 4Bank lights with the same temperature as the overhead fluorescents?

I should invest in green gel! I have red and blue gel for a set of tungsten redheads, but I switched to LEDs as the redheads were a nightmare for me! They were incredibly red and only worked well for me when there was no ambient light source from sunlight. I only sometimes use them to light backgrounds but only in some shoots where there’s lots of time for me to set up before I’m shooting!

[Todd Terry]

[Patrick Corr] “I do struggle when I have to make snap decisions under difficult time constraints when I don’t have time to really plan out locations”

Well, planning of course is a great thing, it’s a necessity not a luxury and you almost can’t do too much of it.

But… looking back over the last almost three decades that I’ve been doing this, I would say some of my best looking scenes where those where I was thrown a curve ball and had to come up with something I wasn’t expecting… those “happy accidents” as Bob Ross would say.

You seem to have a handle on it, you’ll get there.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Your reel is very very pretty, BTW.

Yeah, I stalk newbies here, so I know who I’m dealing with.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Patrick Corr]

Thank you Todd, and I love Bob Ross! Have a great day/evening/night!

It’s evening here in Ireland now! Signing off now!