Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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Personally, the best analogy I can think of right now is that for many, many years, the world of production was a huge city where the only source of water was special wells. Some of those wells were crafted carefully, dug deep, and located with care so that they corresponded with traditional deep sources of water.
Technology started making it easier to dig wells. So easy in fact that everyone and their brother started digging them. But the VAST majority of the people drilling the new wells were new to the water business and most of their wells are shallow, and most of them are positioned poorly.
Right now, folks are selling water on every street corner. So many vendors that it’s barely possible to charge enough to make a profit in the water business. But running a water business is still surprisingly hard work. And not a lot of people will likely stick with it and make it their careers in the long haul.
So those of us who’ve learned to position our wells carefully – and who understand how to operate a sustainable business long ago learned not to try to FORCE the market to do what we want, but rather to keep flexible and watch and be ready when things dry up a bit. Yes, there are still relatively large contracts being let for water. Yes, prices are down. Yes, there’s a GLUT of cheap water sellers everywhere. But those conditions change.
If you love the water business – you’ll find a way to be around when the folding tables and cheap street merchants get tired of playing and look for an easier way to make a buck.
Cuz the water business is not really all the easy.
My 2 cents anyway.
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Mark,
If it was me, I’d probably bring along a second active light. Something small – perhaps a 150 fresnel or small open face light and either a softbox or a silk to diffuse it. If the subject’s skin color turns out to be very dark, you might not be happy with the amount of reflective fill you can bounce off a card – even a shiny one.
There are sometimes issues with subjects faces, anything from big stick out ears or a prominent nose that I need to de-emphasize as to shadow – or blemishes that might dictate a more “straight on” key – if so, it can be VERY hard to use that same light as the fill off a reflector since the angle of incidence is so small on a more frontal key. The geometry of grabbing the key with the reflector can get squirley.
I also VERY seldom do an interview without a tall stand/grip arm/fabric flag combo nearby.
If the guy turns out to be folically challenged, it’s typically MUCH easier to leave the rim light alone and move in a cutter than to climb up and down something trying to futz with the barn doors of a small flying rim light.
YMMV. Good luck and let us know how things work out!
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Bob,
It isn’t so much “use more light with the same setup.”
It’s that the overall goal of traditional 3 point lighting is to model contour and a present to the audience a sense of realistic depth to faces so that they appear less “flat” and more 3-dimensional. In 3-point that’s typically a large soft light anywhere from 15 to 40 degrees off axis to one side from the front. That key casts shadows from “stick in or stick out” features from the plane of the face such as the nose, eye sockets, lips and or chin. Since each face is different, the angle will vary depending on whether you want more or less cast shadow – which itself is a judgement on how pronounced the features of the subject and whether you want the subject to more or less dramatic. A fill light brings details into the otherwise dark shadow side of the face – more fill – more even the appearance and less dramatic. Finally the halo or rim light separates the shape of the head from the background.
The point is that ALL of these things work NO MATTER the complexion of the subject. You can use this approach on an onyx or obsidian statue face OR one of white marble and the result is precisely the same – you create the illusion of depth on your flat (TV screen) surface.
Yes, if the face reflects more (light skin tones) or less (dark skin tones) light – then you will likely have to work with the exposure to get the same amount of light hitting your sensor from the two different reflectivities of the subjects – but the basic light plot remains the same precisely because the TASK remains the same – presenting cues to the viewer about the depth of what they’re looking at.
As other’s have indicated – combining light and dark subjects in the same shot – whether it’s two news anchors with diverse skin colors – or two kitchen appliance variants, one white and one black – brings you to another level of required balance. Then it’s important to look at the individual elements in the frame and either add or subtract light (AND control REFLECTIONS) as necessary to both balance the illumination level AND to shape the objects for the camera sensor.
A good grip catalog has hundreds of devices, purpose designed for masking, scrimming, diffusing, reflecting, coloring and directing light.
There’s a reason for that.
; )
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Mark,
Decades ago, I asked a really well known top lighting pro about this exact subject.
Never forgot his answer. He said “If you’re lighting correctly, you should be able to take a subject with fair skin, substitute someone with a much darker complexion, open the iris a bit and both photos will be perfectly exposed.”
It was nice to hear because what he was saying was that if your lighting ratios are correct, they’ll work for virtually any subject.
We did continue the discussion for a while and he admitted the one area where issues arise is where you have little or no control over the range of contrast in a single shot – essentially pointing out that, if, for instance, you have a bride with the kind of skin tones associated with some african peoples – that extremely dark, almost blue black tones that brings to my mind the actor Yaphett Koto as an example – AND that bride insists on wearing a pure white wedding gown with fine lace detail in a veil- then you’re going to have to work VERY hard with both directed light, shadow, AND negative fill to bring the range of contrast in the overall scene to the point where you can both expose skin AND lace properly and capture all the detail required for a really good shot.
Those are the exceptions, tho.
I still take comfort in his belief that if you’re achieved truly good lighting – which is to say light that defines, separates from the background and creates the illusion of 3 dimensional modeling of the shape of the face and/or body – key, fill, rim, and/or highlights as needed – that that’s going to work with most of your subjects with just minor changes.
So that’s what I’ve done my whole career. Never lit one type of “person” differently than another – just lit one type of “scene” differently – depending on those things like contrast elements that are sometimes unavoidable.
FWIW.
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Well heck, if you’re on a Mac – there’s no need for outside software at all.
Quicktime Pro does a really nice desktop action video capture to quicktime right from the finder.
Under the FILE menu, just invoke “New Screen Recording” and make sure you stop the capture before your drive fills up and you’re ready to go.
Couldn’t be simpler or cheaper.
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I did some tests with my 5dMkii a few months ago with long exposure night sky photography.
My advice is to get the FASTEST lens you can. I shot this informal test with the stock 28-105 f4 and afterwards I REALLY wanted faster glass.
This is where that extra $$ to buy the f1.2 lenses will REALLY pay off.
I drove out into the mountains of northern AZ where it was PITCH BLACK and shot for about 2 hours.
While the fancy intervalometers will certainly work, it’s just as easy to use the cameras BULB setting and use one of the cheap RF remote controls (about $20 online) to fire the shutter and leave it open.
Exposures of more than 5 minutes or so WILL show earth position rotation effects (which is why the fast glass is SO critical.)
And while some modest ISO boost is fine, if you go to far you WILL get significant noise in your images.
I’d try to stay under ISO 1200 – maybe less if you have good fast lenses.
Good luck.
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From my Final Cut Pro timeline I export an encode of the video in iPhone quality and drop it into my iDisk then send the client an email link. If it’s a long video (like 30-60 minutes – the encoding might take a while – but it’s background encoding so it’s never any real hassle.
Nobody – not even my corporate PC clients have had any problem viewing the results – it’s a very modern H-264 encoding which holds up really well at the paltry iPhone bitrate. They can blow it up if they like to larger sizes for projection and while certainly not perfect, it’s darn good.
Usually plays on their box via quicktime for PC, Windows Media Player or Silverlight – any modern player that can parse a stream in H-264 — which is pretty much any video playback software from the last couple of years.
If you’re an FCP editor – and have a .mac account, it’s all there as a turnkey system. Just add dot-Mac and set up an iDisk on the Apple cloud and you’re totally good to go.
YMMV.
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Warning: Odd and possibly uninteresting story ahead.
Once upon a time a LONG time ago I was in college.
I had a 7:40 class that got out at 8:20 – and then a 9:40 class. So every day I’d go to the cafeteria and get a coffee and something to nibble and read the paper.
On day I found myself entering the cafeteria with not a penny to my name and no paper anywhere to keep my hands busy.
At first, I was a bit confused. I didn’t have ANYTHING to do. And for some reason, I thought to myself “why can’t I simply sit here for the allotted time and be content? Why must I ALWAYS be doing something. So I decided to simply see if I could SIT and contemplate life inside my head for the allottted time.
IT WAS ASTONISHINGLY DIFFICULT. For most of us raised on constant stimulation and/or interaction with others, with media, with tasks and deadlines and the GUILT that attends the appearance of not accomplishing anything with ones time – well, it was a HUGE eye opener.
And I vowed to do it again and again until I could be comfortable with just being by myself and not having to do something to justify my existence in THIS time and in THIS place with nothing obvious to do.
It became something of a very minor ZEN exercise for me. But after a few weeks (3 days a week class schedule is all) I TAUGHT myself to be comfortable when I had to simply sit quietly and do nothing for an hour.
I can’t tell you how many times since then that I’ve found myself stuck behind a delayed flight – or waiting for someone or something LATE that I had little or no control over that I’ve had to dust off and use that SKILL over and over again in my life.
I suppose it’s what people in the old days called PATIENCE.
Whatever you call it, It IS a useful life skill.
Try it some time.
Plop down in a chair and see if you can entertain yourself in your own head for an hour without the NEED for outside stimulation.
I suspect it will likely be MUCH harder than you think.
And useful for the rest of your life.
YMMV.
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Oops.
Sounds to me like someone was so busy shooting VIDEO with their 5dMkii that they FORGOT that they were shooting video with a world class STILL camera.
If they’d simply taken a few seconds at the end of each video “take” for stills (just like they do on REAL movie sets all the time using a dedicated publicity stills photographer) tthey would ALSO have gotten 12.5 megapixel stills that would easily work for anything this side of billboards and/or building wraps.
Got to plan and think ahead, folks.
No excuse to miss having EXCELLENT stills from every video shoot from now on – but you have to plan for it, and take the very modest time it takes in the field.
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I’m fond of the phrase “get your mind out of the gutter so mine can float by”
at least this time you and I are paddling in the clearer stream!