Lighting night interior with few ressources

[David Teulieres]

Hello everyone and thank you team Deakins for this very valuable place that this forum is.

David here, back at studying cinematography, and currently far from home for a few months. All I could bring is my Pyxis6k, 24 and 50 mil lenses, tripod, a 60w mini cob and a pair of reflectors/diffusers. Where I live I have 4 practical lamps, and two mirrors. As for the furniture, a black table, black chairs, black bookshelf, a black sofa and a shiny black coffee table. Walls are white though.

I do that on myself, alone on my spare time so I though it would be a good exercise to shot a simple short scene with 2-3 different shot values and reiterate to two three times to try and test variation in the settings.

I made 2 iterations with some happy results and some unsatisfying ones. Since I have no crew to exchange with and get some fresh ideas and perspectives, would you mind sharing some knowledge, advices or ideas about lighting for full black furniture set with a few lighting ressources.

Also, might be a trivial question, in that settings, night scene with 2700k practicals and one unknown kelvin practical, how would you set the WB of your camera, round up to 3200 or line up with 2700 ?

Looking forward reading your thoughts.

Topic

[Sir_Fromsworth]

Would love to see the shots youve done if they are on youtube or something?

[dmullenasc]

If the practicals are 2700K, whether you set the camera to 2700K, 3000K, 3200K, 3400K, etc. just depends on the degree of warmth you want — it’s a creative choice.

• This reply was modified 3 months, 4 weeks ago by dmullenasc.

[David Teulieres]

@Sir_fromsworth, unfortunately, I do not plan to publish these on youtube, they merely are a beginner sandbox, I was thinking maybe posting some screenshot here -if allowed- for members to critic my tests.

@dmullenasc, I think I am a bit insecure about that, I wanted my tungsten light to be white and have some difficulties judging this on my monitor, I couldn’t tell if going to 3200k to accommodate the “kelvin rating unknown” practical added some yellow to my key tungsten light. Anyway, thanks for your input, after reading it I took some time to play with different WB, to explore a bit more the creative possibilities this settings offer.

[ThomasBommelWeishaeupl]

On the Pyxis it does not matter. Changing the Temperature in post is no problem with .Braw files. But check the app store, there are color meters, which are not accurate  but at least you have a way to compare. For example the app might say this light is 3350 kelvin and a good colormeter will say it is spot on 3200k but it is still a help for comparing light sources and make them match eachother. So for convenience if one of the light is the key light i would use the key light as the one you set your WB to because overall i would prefer good skintones to other lights being accurate

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[David Teulieres]

@ThomasBommelWeishaeupl  thanks for you inputs, I figured out all this those past months, experimented a bit with color balance, for now it is just “okay I want my tungstens for the subject to be warm and my background / shadow to be blue”. Baby steps, I tend to be slow 🙂

I worked my medium and close shots, and kind of get some decent results, but I just can’t get a satisfying wide shot. I have to put more efforts into it.

To be honest I think there is something flawed in my methodology, I need to study a bit more as I can’t figure everything just by myself.

I keep thinking about two things Roger Deakins said: – light it the way you see it in your head and – if there is no story there is nothing to practice (as quoted by someone who attended a Q&A). And as of now I still can’t see clearly what I want my image to look, and I have no story whatsoever – I am definitely not a writer. I feel those are more blocking than the lack of lighting gear.

Anyway I should be back to studying already!

[Author]

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