Lessons

Lesson Info

Lighting 101

So if you guys notice we switched the room around and so it's backlit. It's for purpose. We're gonna talk about ambient light today. Available light is a lot of people say, um, daylight using daylight for capturing, uh, imagery for motion. So if we take a look, I call this thing lighting one on one and lighting one on one for me. What it really incorporates is just a basic understanding of reading light and how light can strike an individual and understanding what? That certain light pattern, How that light when that light falls on somebody how it can actually impact your image. You know, um, you often hear the term Oh, this room's got beautiful light, you know? Or you walk outside and the lights so beautiful today. And I think there's a lot of people that say, Oh, there's a lot of speculation he in the light and you throughout these terms, but I don't think people really kind of drum it down and go. Okay. Why is the light beautiful? You know, why is this studio Why do I think that the...

light is beautiful in the studio, you know, So even before we get into nuts and bolts. And even before we get into kind of this idea of, like, what's an amateur? And what's a full stop? Um, I want to give you guys an idea of what it means that there's beautiful light. So when you walk into a room, there's gonna be certain pools of light as it hits this room. Right? So if we were to pull back and in the studio and I'm gonna stand here and look at this room, there's a wonderful light pattern here that's coming in from these windows and the first thing you should ever do before you start even looking at taking your camera out is just to get a feel for where the lights falling, because in this room, the last thing I'm going to do is take somebody and put them against this wall, right? But I see so many people do that. They take somebody, they grab them into this room where all the light is so gorgeous, right? And then they put them here. Why is that? Because they think that the background is more important than the light, right? So even as I walk forward, I don't even need a camera to prove this. As I walk forward, you can see how all of a sudden I start to just lighten up. As I step into this light right, you start to see shadows sculpt my face, you start to see highlights and you start to see these wonderful things that creep up just by taking the hot minute and looking at how your light is falling in the room. Now, if you look at here, there's a gigantic pool of light that's coming all the way around in this room. And it's being cast here about this windows, right? It's being all cast by these windows, so I have a distinct direction of light right now. So if I put myself against these windows, I'm backlit and we all know that backlit situations are really, really difficult. Thio capture an image in, and so you try to avoid that backlight, right? And then if you turn me to the side now, I'm side lit, right? And if I turn me flat to the windows Well, look at that later, I'm gonna be flat lit. So there's a number of different things here. When I started learning lighting I started learning photography when it came to this, I had so much fun because it was as if this was a gigantic soft box that was fixed. And I had to move my subject in the light as opposed to moving my light around the subject. And I think when we first start lighting and we first start understanding how light works, we get this idea that if we move the light back or move the light core, it kind of is almost counterintuitive to how we wanna work because we should be moving our subject in and out of the light at first because we fix our light in one position than we move our subject around. It's gonna be much easier for us to understand what's happening with that light. Okay, so I've always just used one light for a lot of different things. And as I got into video and as I got in a kind of doing more emotion and interview and stuff like that, I started adding more lights. And so we're gonna talk about artificial lighting later. We're just gonna talk about available light right now. So before I move on, like how does that feel to you guys? How does this How does this kind of make you make you Does it make you look at light differently? And has you approach kind of looking at this idea of basic lighting? Yeah. Cool. All right, So what's a stop there? Stop signs, Right. There's bus stops. There's all this stuff. So what? What what exactly do I mean by a stop? Well, photography. We've got numbers that indicate for aperture certain stops of light. Right? And if you look at the screen here, we've got one one point four to two point eight four five six. All these numbers are representative, just of in relation to how much light is being measured in terms of f stop. Okay. And these particular numbers are important because one to one point four is an actual stop. One point four two two is an actual stop. Two to two point eight is an actual stop. Okay, so when I say Oh, I'm a stop off. What I'm really saying is that if my light measurement is at F eight and my camera exposure is a five six, my camera is over exposed by one stop Okay. You guys kind of grasp that concept a little bit good. So, I mean, it's kind of hard to memorize. I mean, I've been doing this for a long time, and I still get tripped up about what the stop full stop increments are, so there's actually pneumonic to remember it. So if you got one and one point four, think of one one and keep doubling. So one, two, four, eight, sixteen. That way you could build the other half. One point four, two point eight, five point six, eleven. Twenty two. That's just so you can remember it. You know, I I get into a situation where you know, if I'm teaching, you know, and I've got a million different things going on in my brain at one time. And if I misspeak a measurement of light or a stop, you know, this helps me kind of remember where my stops are, what my stops are. Okay, so you hear a lot about contrast ratios. What's a contrast ratio? A contrast ratio is a measurement of light against another measurement of light. Basically, if light is falling on a subject and there is a shadow somewhere on that subject. There is a relationship between that highlight and that shadow. That relationship is contrast ratio. And so we can actually measure this contrast ratio because lighting is logarithmic right, which means, Ah, oneto. One contrast ratio means it's flat. The lighting that's bright on one side is the same intensity on the other side. So there's a flat look to that person, right? Right now I'm standing here and I'm being lit by the studio lights, and I'm pretty much flat lit right? And there's a reason, you know, for for flat lighting, and we'll talk about that when we actually go into the demo. When you get into your contrast ratio is your to do one's your four ones, your eight to ones. When you talk about contrast ratios, they again it's a really it's a relationship between one measurement of light and another measurement of light. So if my measurement is eight and I'm at five point six, that means about two to one. Okay, because there is, in a sense, to units of light and one of you one unit of light next to it. All right. How am I doing? Okay. I know it's like Matthey, but But it's important for us to kind of know these things because it allows us to really get a good feel for what we're looking at, because here's the reality of the situation. Guys, if you can light by contrast ratio, you can replicate your lighting anywhere in the world. You don't need to rely on what time of day it is because you can modify and shape light based entirely upon what your measurements are. All right, now we'll talk about that a little bit more. But I'm a big believer in looking at how light falls on a subject. So we're gonna break my camera out in a minute. We're gonna break my, uh, my, my, our little assistant Danielle, out here in a minute, we're gonna work with her and just to see how the light will look all right. Now, if we continue on, I'm gonna leave. Let's see here. I'm gonna leave these guys up, Okay? So before we even start, let's talk about this light meter. Let's talk about proper light reading, Okay? So there's two things when you want to think about using a light meter. First thing is, where's your subject. And where's your light? It's really, really basic really simple. And, you know, I I know that some of you guys at home or even some of you guys in this room may already know a lot of this stuff. But I really believe that if we understand and focus on the fundamentals of lighting and start from our ground up and build up, we're gonna be much better lighting technicians in the future. Okay, so I'm gonna turn my meter on. I'm going to hit my little button here. I'm gonna pick HD City because we're actually shooting motion. Now, if we were shooting still photographs, I'd actually hit either shutter speed or aperture setting and set my aperture set my shutter speed or whatever it is. But in this case, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit my HD city mode. Okay, So, Bob, quiz. What frame rate We shooting at twenty four. Oh, that's the twenty four we're shooting. Our frame rate is twenty four. Right. So I'm gonna click twenty four, make sure my friend is twenty four percent friends per second. I'm gonna pick an ice, so I'm gonna start off. I also won sixty and kind of see how my readings are. And then what's my shutter, Speed fifty fifty. Good. So if I'm gonna be standing as I am to the camera right now, with windows behind me, someone take a guess. Where should I put the meter? Facing the windows. So the face of the windows. Where's another place? I could put the meter under my chin. Where's another place? I e could put the meter wherever the lights being reflected from where light being reflected from. Okay, so, technically, those are all correct answers because I didn't tell you what I'm exposing for. Right? So let's think about this. The first answer was pointing towards the window. If I point it towards the window, Okay. The dome is gonna face toward the window. What am I exposing for? The window with light in the back of the head and the light coming from the window. Okay. If I put it under my chin, what am I exposing for? The light falling on my face? Put it here. What? Exposing for the light falling this way. All right, so the meter will Onley give you a reading based upon what you want the reading for. It's only gonna give you a number. You have to understand that number is actually saying because at this point, if I take a reading behind my head and I get five six, take a reading up here. I'm gonna get three point to take your reading over here. I'll get four point out. Take a reading over here. I'll get four point five those air. All technically correct readings. Right? But you gotta understand what those readings mean. Okay. So if I was gonna expose for myself as I'm looking at you and the light falling on my face because what am I gonna expose for a human being? I'm exposed for me. I'm gonna pop that meter right under my chin. Get the reading, and that reading is gonna come out at two point five or Sorry. Get that reading. It's gonna come out at three point two. Okay. Now, you notice I closed off the dome and opened up that dumb right? So close it off and I opened it up. When you close off the dome, its aim or directional reading. Okay. If you open up the dome, it's gonna actually get more of a untangled reading. Okay, so how are we doing? Great. Doing great. Excellent. Now I don't go anywhere without this meter, especially if I'm doing interviews because I'm gonna do interviews with multiple people. What I'm gonna actually do is on interview one. I was at f eight F five point six or maybe I was Maybe I couldn't get to it. And I was like, seven point one and block. What I will do later on is I'll take those notes so that when I go to the next location and I've got to do another interview, I can still set the same contrast ratios and have my lighting look the same throughout the course of that film. Okay? Because you don't want interviews to be, like, completely different as you're cutting back and forth, because not only does the mood change entirely if the lighting look changes, it doesn't keep that continuity. Remember, we looked at the continuity of the bag of bread, right? And it was full, and then all of a sudden it disappeared. You're like, What the heck, right? So So So I know we're talking about lighting, and I know there's a lot of things about letting. But if you break them off into manageable chunks, we can then start to really understand why a tool like this matters why we're reading a light matters. And we even talked about the camera yet even talked about white balance yet, okay.