Interview lighting basics – suggestions?

[Peter Rummel]

Shooting someone with a bright window as a background is always tough. Doing it with available light is just next to impossible. While I can conceive of some room configurations that might work for this, I wouldn’t rely on a room I had never seen to work out.

Light coming into the room, bouncing around on reflectors, and then illuminating your subject just isn’t going to be powerful enough. You’ll end up with a sillouette, or a totally blown out background. The traditional way to do this is to darken the background and then light your subject using daylight balanced sources. Gelling your background windows using a roll of ND (neutral density) gel is the most common way of darkening the background – this lets you use less light for your key, making it much more comfortable for your subject. HMIs are the lighting source of choice for these situations, because of their powerful output and daylight balance. Flos and LEDs can also be daylight balanced, but may not have enough pop to do the job.

A word about color balance – HMIs and other supposedly “daylight” balanced sources can be pretty close, but daylight itself can change color throughout the day, or when overcast, or when in shadow. Be prepared to adjust your sources accordingly.

A couple of ideas….

When I want to use the view outside a window as a background, instead of shooting it straight on I’ll shoot along the window with the 2 chairs facing each other next to the window. This way I’m using the window light as the key. This setup typically needs a little extra pop, so I’ll supplement it with a daylight balanced key on the window side.

And if you are shooting the window straight on, have you considered using a chroma key instead? Shooting the subject and background separately, you’ll be able to use an appropriate exposure for each.

[Arturo Glass]

If I’m scrapping the idea of shooting the city in the background, would a Litepanels 1X1 5600 Degree Flood Panel work for my key light, using some reflectors for this and the natural light as fill light?