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Generally what they mean when they say they don’t use negative stock is that they don’t use camera negative stock, which is much higher in ISO (and grainier) than lab intermediate and print stocks.
Intermediate dupe stock is a “negative” stock in the sense that it creates the opposite density of what it is copying, unlike a reversal (aka slide) stock. So one can create a positive or negative intermediate depending on what you record from digitally. So it’s not really accurate to call it a “positive” stock, it’s either. It can create a positive image if it’s a copy of a negative image. Same goes for print stock — the image is positive only because it’s a copy of a negative so naturally the densities get reversed.
Any lighting package should always contain some CTO, CTB, Plus-Green, and Minus-Green gels even if just in scraps.
Whether you used HMIs or tungsten with gels, or Kinos, with or without gels, just depended on the situation, the scale of the shot, your lighting package, etc. Keep in mind that you generally lose more output shifting tungsten towards daylight with blue gels than you do shifting HMIs towards tungsten with orange gels, plus HMIs are already more energy-efficient. So for a larger space where you are aiming for balancing to a Cool White fluorescent color (more like 4700K with some green), you would be more likely to use HMIs than tungsten. However in a small space, you might try tungsten with gels (the color tends to be “richer” from gelled tungsten in some ways but that is subjective.)
If you have to get closer to 3200K, then tungsten makes more sense (and HMIs gelled to 3200K never look quite right to my eyes compared to tungsten.)
There are too many variables to give you a definitive answer. My only caveat is that I tend to avoid mixing techniques for whatever the key light is on the face, I wouldn’t use gelled HMIs in one spot and then gelled tungsten in another for a key (fill or backlight is less critical.)
Not Roger, but I think muslin is slightly more “matte” (definitely a rougher surface) so the bounce off of it might be a bit softer; otherwise the difference might be that unbleached muslin has a warmth to it compared to UltraBounce.
A “perfect” theoretical mirror allows you to increase the distance the light travels and thus get a slower fall-off near the subject.
But nothing in life is perfect, if the mirror is dusty and some light is bounced off of the dust, then that light in essence “originates” from that point and the fall-off rate is calculated from there. So what results is a mix of light, some from the original source reflected off of the clean parts of the mirror, and other light reflected off of the dust of the mirror. I suspect that the resulting fall-off rate is also a mix.
It’s a similar issue to the sun shining through a dusty window, some rays have long fall-off rate while others have a faster rate starting from the window as the source, not the sun as the source, so it’s sort of a mix. At least, that’s my theory…
Each lab calibrates their printers to whatever range between 1 and 50 for each color they want, 25-25-25 will not be the same at another lab. And film stocks rarely are printed at the same number value for each color to get to neutral, so having one color at 29 and another at 31 is not significant.
Plus there are some day to day variations from the processing despite what the lab tells you. And there are some roll variations despite what Kodak tells you. And DPs themselves often expose within a 1/3-stop variation because we’re not perfect.
Some DPs just printed everything at the same set of numbers mainly to show them their exposure variations, the processing variations, the stock variations… which to some degree is educational but would also drive you nuts, plus the director and editor would be cutting dailies with these variations visible.
But even if there were zero variations on everyone’s part, it still doesn’t mean that to get to neutral that the film would print at the same number for each color.
It’s always easier to fill a diffusion frame evenly with an LED softlight or any multi-bulb unit like a Maxibrute when you lack the space to back-up a hard light. But if you have the space, then you can evenly fill a diffusion frame with one hard source if it is full-flood and backed-up enough. Or use multiple hard sources in an array…
I wrote an entire chapter for the 11th Edition of the ASC Manual on this topic so it’s a bit broad to cover in one post. It all depends on the look you want. DFN works best when the moon is the only source of light in the scene because real daylight, whether sunny or overcast, will be much brighter than any other light sources in the frame like campfires or streetlamps. If there are other sources, dusk-for-night works better so that they expose realistically.
If I could post images on this forum, I’d show you my photos of real moonlit landscapes and how much they look like day-for-night shots other than you can see stars in the sky.
Black density in a film print off of a negative depends on the printer lights used.
Let’s say you shoot a roll with the lens cap on or just develop an unexposed roll… in the printer light scale of 0-50 points for RGB, with 25 being the middle, so in theory 25-25-25 would be the printer lights used to print something normally exposed to look normal in brightness (in reality, it’s not exactly that, for lots of reasons), as you go higher and higher, like 40-40-40 let’s say, the blacks will be denser in the print until you reach maximum possible for the stock (D-Max), which you can only go past if you leave silver in the print.
So if you expose a scene so that it needs to be printed in the high 30’s or low 40’s as opposed to the mid 25’s, then the blacks in the image will be denser unless you have some factor that is lifting them like base fog density from push-processing. Or if the overexposure is causing more flare in the image, like from an overly hot sky. There are limits because at some point if you put all of your information on the shoulder of the characteristic curve, where contrast flattens out, the image will look a bit flat with clipped highlights even if in theory the blacks are blacker. But in general, if you rate a color negative stock slower in ASA than recommended, so that it generally prints in the high 30s / low 40s, it will have richer blacks in the print, which means a bit more saturation and feeling of contrast, “snap”.
But with digital color-correction and digital projection, it’s different. You can set any shadow area to “0 IRE” which is pure digital black… but whether it looks natural or artificially crushed depends on the image. And black level in digital projection depends on the technology used — today, laser projection is capable of black levels we used to see in film prints (if not more so) but before that, we’ve been living with somewhat grey-ish blacks with typical digital projection even if the signal is “zero”.
Thicker and denser mean the same thing.
With more exposure and/or more development, more exposed silver halides get developed into silver — with color film, this means more color dye is also formed in those layers before the silver is removed in the bleach step.
The difference in look between getting more density by exposure versus only doing by pushing the development is in the grain and contrast.
Pushing increases the contrast and also the base fog level (which in some ways can give the illusion of contrast loss due to lifted blacks); it also increases visible graininess because the unexposed silver halides (smaller/ slower) still get washed away eventually, leaving only the larger/faster grains. If you had exposed the negative more, then the smaller/slower grains (in the shadow areas) would have filled-in the gaps, giving the impression of a tighter grain structure.
Density on the negative increases with:
- Exposure and/or
- Development (time and/or temperature)
So any number of combinations are possible — you could overexpose the negative and develop it normally, you could expose normally and push-process the negative, you could even, for example, underexpose by -1/3 stop but push by +1 stop, resulting in a theoretical +2/3 stop extra density (push-processing however is not that precise.)
I still cannot put a photo into a reply without getting the “critical error” message. I even tried a very small and very compressed JPEG in case it was a file size issue.
I’ve done eyeball shots on a 100mm macro, a 200mm macro, and the end of a 24-290mm zoom with a diopter…
One issue is that with a 100mm macro, the lens is only a few inches from the eye, not leaving a lot of room for lighting, but it works. A 200mm macro allows you to be at a more comfortable distance so I would say anywhere in between 100mm and 200mm could work for you.
In some ways, it’s easier for you that you want burned-out windows… because you can expose the interior mostly with natural light coming from the windows (and whatever you add) and let the view be overexposed.
You didn’t say whether the huts had glass on the windows. And if you wanted actually whited-out backgrounds or just very overexposed but with some detail.
Lots of ways to make a window hot or burned-out… you could just light the interior at a level that the exterior view is many stops overexposed.
Or you could dirty the glass (if there is glass) and hit it with a bright light from outside. Or use a very light diffusion gel like Hampshire Frost, again, hit it with some light.
A net stretched on a frame outside a window will also help wash-out and blur details. And you can hit the net with light to wash-out the view even more. Or you could just put a frame of white outside the window and light that for a white background.
