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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.
In the prints, the colors got darker and less saturated with ENR. Since usually this approach was decided in prep, costumes, props, lighting colors, etc. were tested to see if any compensation was needed. For example, blood effects in “Sleepy Hollow” were adjusted, using a bright red blood on set so that it would not look too black due to the ENR process. I can’t tell you the specific effect on each color shade but by the early 2000s, colorists had their own digital simulation of ENR for DIs, reducing the usage of ENR itself — though in truth, it was not the same thing because leaving silver in the print itself allows the blacks to be deeper than D-MAX, the max density a print can achieve, a sort of blacker-than-black. There were problems with this though, silver in the print (just as with true b&w prints) tends to absorb infrared heat from projector bulbs, reducing the life of the print.
One issue that always comes up with a desaturation process is that visually, pastel colors seem to drop in saturation faster than primary colors, so a subtle color like in skin tones will go monochromatic faster than a bright red stop sign will. This is why it is better to control saturation first with production design and costumes so as to preserve skin tone saturation relative to everything else in the frame. Of course, with digital color-correction, one can isolate objects and adjust saturation more selectively though that can be time-consuming.
In general, it’s always better to get the look you want first by what’s in front of the camera, second by how you film it with your camera, and third by post-production.
In terms of color, adding a weak amount of overall white light on a negative will lift the blacks and wash-out the colors, it’s like mixing a tiny bit of white paint into colored paints.
Leaving a little amount of black silver in a print will deepen the blacks and darken the colors, slightly softening them — it’s like mixing a tiny amount of black paint into colored paints.
It’s a bit harder to visualize the opposite — flashing a print or leaving silver in the negative.
Flashing a print with white light fogs the highlights with density (normally a brighter area in the image is denser on the negative, more clear on the print) so your whites get a bit greyed, less intense, lowering contrast in the highlights. Does that affect saturation? Maybe… but only because contrast, black level and saturation are all tied together, so softening the highlights and lowering the contrast will make the colors seem a bit softer.
Leaving black silver in the negative means the highlights in the subject will get denser as if overexposed (some people compensate by underexposing the stock). So there is an increase in contrast but mostly in the highlights. There is also a larger increase in visible graininess compared to leaving silver in the print because print stock has a very low ASA so the silver grains are quite small compared to those in camera negative. Again, does leaving black silver in the negative affect saturation? Sort of, it’s a bit like having a black & white negative layered on top of your color negative.
You could affect the release prints by altering the IP or IN — plus there were silver retention processes for prints like ENR that increased the density of the blacks and the contrast in the shadows. There was also some darkening of colors and loss of saturation from leaving silver in the print.
All of this is to say that you worked backwards from your planned release print strategy in terms of the negative.
Flashing the negative increases the base fog level, lifting the blacks and bringing up some shadow detail normally buried in the contrast of the print, especially an ENR print which I believe “Fight Club” used (or Deluxe’s version called ACE.)
One thing to keep in mind is that pre-digital color-correction for features, you mainly had a standardized contrast (gamma) & saturation using Kodak print stock and FCP processing. Black level could be affected by printer lights (which in turn affected contrast & saturation), but this was mitigated by the fact that most prints came from dupe negatives — the extra density in the original negative had been compensated for when making the color-corrected IP/IN so release prints used a normal set of printer lights (James Cameron got around this by asking the lab to make lighter IPs & denser INs for “Titanic”.)
I think you answered your own question — are there people on the edge of frame or architecture? If architecture, then barrel distortion will be more distracting than rectilinear correction. If people, the opposite may be true.
I made a post on Instagram about this yesterday because I couldn’t put images here, about the two types of extreme wide-angle lenses used on “2001”, a 28mm Cooke (14mm equivalent in Super-35) which was rectilinear and a 14mm-ish Fairchild-Curtis 160º (7mm equivalent in Super-35) which was very barrel distorted.
