I said this on set the other day, “Let god do the lighting”
But what does that mean? Well, it’s as simple as it sounds. It’s the idea of using only the available natural light instead other, well, non-natural methods.
When is this applicable? I think there are three distinct situations when this applies:
When you are under a time constraint from a production standpoint
Limited time with Talent.
Limited time allowed in the shooting space.
When it’s hard / impractical to bring all / any of your lights due to physical limitations. (sometimes you’re not allowed to light, sometimes you physically can’t bring your lights to difficult locations)
It’s the desired look
Ok, so now back to me the other day. We (Branded, the marketing company and I) took longer than anticipated to find our shooting locations for the day. The set was a golf clubhouse that had an inordinate amount of vaulted ceilings and hard surfaces.
Sound quickly became my number 1 concern.
Because of that, we ended up setting up shop in a couple smaller offices that worked better for audio. BUT.. the spaces were small enough that setting up lighting became difficult. And now, because of deliberating where to shoot - we were quickly almost 30 minutes behind our schedule which was already tight.
And that’s when I famously announced that we should “Let god do the lighting”. Let’s take a look at our first location in the picture below that is a screen grab raw out of camera..
Luckily we had a very even, gray day to help pull this off since we were shooting in front of a window. In this scenario you have no choice but to make the window light your key light.
The idea was to get the talent sideways to allow as much light onto the face as possible. Then, i was quickly able to place one of my v-flat boards directly out of frame to the right to bounce that light back in as a fill.
Would i have loved to knock down the exposure outside a little? Absolutely. But for two reasons i didn’t:
it wasn’t bright enough to do that while still properly exposing the shot indoors (not just the subject, but the other elements of the room, table and walls
it was actually fairly dark outside, which properly exposed looked darker than the bright feeling that we wanted for the shot.
My whole lighting set-up for this shot was a single white bounce board. So my “lighting” was set-up in 5 minutes.
Let’s look at one more raw screen grab from another location on-set that day. This one I’ll have to label as “Cheating on God”. Let me show you why…
So I tried to do god-only lighting in this scene.. but even they weren’t powerful enough to overcome the limitations of the room. As I said it was a dark day, and this room had a 3 windows - but they were facing Northeast.
I was able to use the natural light again as the key light. But with no light behind, I needed some separation on the subject with a hair light. With my Godox TL60, I was able to both get a nice light on the hair and I was able to wrap it around enough to fill in on the right side of her face. (plus, the tube light runs on an internal battery, so i don’t have to waste time running power to it)
We turned on the practical in the background just for ambiance, it wasn’t helping with the subject. In fact, the wall in the back was so dark, even with the practical on, that I couldn’t stand it anymore. I quickly grabbed an Astra 1x1 and threw a little light just on the back wall to help.
So I guess you could say I cheated on god twice. But after making up so much time on the first set-up, I was able to take an extra 15 minutes to fiddle with the lighting a little more on the second set-up.
-mike
www.mohovideo.com