Bounce Lighting

[Vasu]

Hi Master Roger, Student of Your Great Work.

 

Lately I have been using bounce lighting method and the quality of the light is very naturalistic and realistic too. but how do you control the spill on the walls from those large bounces which could kill our contrast in our wide & compact wide shots. if we use cutters to large extent it reduces the lights intensity and could not get the desired exposure. How do you deal with the spill from those lights and maintain the same contrast throughout the scenes.

 

Thank You.

Topic

[dmullenasc]

The cutters shouldn’t be reducing light intensity on the subject, just the background, but if they are, then you might need to increase the light intensity to compensate (add an additional light to the bounce or use a stronger light). You can also use negative fill opposite the bounce to add some contrast.

[Vasu]

Thanks for the Insight David Mullen sir. Do we have any calculated distance between the light and the bounce source and from the bounce source to the subject.?

[dmullenasc]

Tends to be a practical issue involving the space restrictions. Sometimes you don’t have the room to back up a light to fill a bounce surface so you’re better off with multiple smaller lights closer. But that’s the nice thing about a big diffused light, you can always add another light into the mix to increase the output if you’ve fallen short.

[Richard Harling]

Bounce lighting is spatial, it doesn’t have the precision of direct light, give it room… To control it, it needs larger cutters closer to the subject yet staying out of the action of the scene. Bounced light while close to your subject is at its “softest”…. as you you move it away from your subject it becomes more directional (which that manages its distribution) . That is a consideration for the control of your lighting.

[Vasu]

This is great. New insight about bounce light

[Richard Harling]

Thank you but its not new I just mean to define the qualities and control soft sources. All the best with your work!

[Vasu]

Yes. Bounce lighting largely has to deal with space restrictions

 

[Vasu]

Thank You Ricahrd.

 

[LucaM]

I have a doubt about the color of bounce light.

I was watching a movie with some scenes in a dark room with only flashlights as practical lights, with a very cold color, somewhere around 5500/6000 k.   The walls of the room were made of wood with a warm dark  color. To make the scene possible the actors had some bounce light on their faces, but the lights had the same cold color of the flashlights. Now, if their motivation was that the light from the flashlights bounced back on the actors, it should have been a warm light, not a cold one (that was caused by a white surface in front of the flashlights to create a fill light on the actor). The scene was done in a very good way, in my opinion, and I think that as audience we are so used to this effect (the source and the bounce having the same color) that if they had used a warm light on the actor it would have made the scene a bit confusing. So, what’ s your advice?

Going for realism and using a bounce light of the same color of surfaces around the actor but risking a disorienting effect, or going for a traditional route and using a white surface (so a bounce of the same color of the source) but obtaining an unrealistic effect?

 

[dmullenasc]

If your wide shots clearly show the cold flashlight beams bouncing off of warm surfaces and picking up that color, then normally you would try and match that in tighter coverage — it’s not disorienting nor unrealistic if it is clear what causes the colors.

I don’t think it has to be exact when going in tighter, just depends on whether you think the viewer’s eye will catch a shift. You might, for example, use unbleached muslin for a slightly warmed-up bounce when the wood walls are off-camera if you less of a difference.

Of course, a room is made up of more than one color surface so once the actor moves closer and deeper into the room into a tighter shot in a different area where there are more off-camera surfaces, you might be more free to let the bounce just be the same color as the source light.

[LucaM]

Thanks a lot David! I always appreciate the time you and Roger dedicate to explain and teach things to unexperienced people like me.

I’m doing some tests to see what works better, but i think that making clear to the audience what is coloring the bouncing light could be the right solution for me. Thanks for the tip!

[Author]

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