And then the other thing that I do uses a much larger source, which for me is usually a 10K running through two 12 × 12 ft. layers of diffusion, usually light grid and full grid placed about a foot apart from each other. I determine what the best key light is for an actor or an actress because lighting is made up both from very large sources and from small sources. I’ll usually do it during a wardrobe test. Usually I have two large 12 × 12 ft. sources, one on camera right and one on camera left at about a 45-degree angle from the actor about twelve feet away or so. I can turn one light off and turn the other on, and then I can determine how an actress will look with the right side and the left side keys. One quickly finds out in the testing period how to make an actress sparkle, what to do and what not to do. Through experience I know what other corrective lights will do, but in a test I want to find what one source is doing, whether it is a small source or a larger source. Later, during shooting, I’ll have a combination of sources. Sometimes I am quite surprised how good an actress looks in a hard light.
In most “mainstream” films, especially romantic comedies, we expect to see beautiful-looking people. So my job is to make sure that they look as good as they can. In preproduction I do a series of tests, so I would say, “OK, here I am finding what’s so wonderful about this face, and if I do . . . But this idea is not so good and I believe that I am taking away the actress’s stronger points and I am not validating how wonderful she could look.” So I am very old Hollywood in protecting my leading lady and also protecting my leading actor. And then sometimes that means that for beauty lighting I’m forced to light an actress maybe flatter than I’d like to, but I control the light that is hitting the actress and I protect her. Cameron Diaz has a very angular face. She is gorgeous, but because she is so angular, she really cannot be hit by the same light that might work so well for Drew Barrymore.
Usually the sources that I use depend on the situation that I am in; I could be using 4 × 4 Kino Flos with muslin on them, or I might use a larger source, if I have a larger room. That could be a 20K going through double diffusion of the light grid or full grid. I could use a medium or fairly large Chimera bag, and inside that bag I might have one or two layers of diffusion. Very often a single 4 ft. Kino Flo light is a wonderful key source, especially if you are in a situation where you don’t have a lot of resources or power. And sometimes if the light isn’t soft enough and I am working with a high-speed stock, I will take a Kino Flo and then put a 4 × 4 diffusion in front of that, and miraculously it becomes a very soft, beautiful diffusion. If a Kino Flo is in a horizontal position, it is going to have a wider wrap around the face, and if you put it in a vertical position, the characteristic of a shadow is going to be a lot harder. Very often I end up using them halfway between these two positions. I’ll go up to an actress and put the light in a vertical way, then I turn it to a horizontal position, and then, often, I find that the very best is going to be the diagonal.
Even when using soft light, one has to be vigilant lighting actresses. Sometimes even soft light is a bit out of the right position, or the actress is doing something different from what she did in the rehearsal, which does sometimes happen, and the quality, the attractiveness, of the lighting has diminished significantly. So one cannot just light and go away; one has to be watching all the time. If I find that for a particular actress a soft light from the left side might be best for her, I can still bring excitement and contrast to the image by using selective “strikes” from a Source Four, having a strike of hard light come across part of her clothing or the chair that she is sitting on. Or knowing that the actress is going to walk through a hard light that might be not the most attractive thing, I just use a flag to block off her face. The hard light hits her clothing; for that moment you will get a splash of light that is three or four stops too hot.
Often I’ll bring contrast and interest to the scene by doing things with hard light in the middle ground and background of the scene. What I call beauty lighting is really finding what’s most pleasing for the particular actress who is in front of the camera.
There is a peculiar problem when lighting some leading actors and actresses that has more to do with psychology than with lighting.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
There have been leading ladies and men down through the years that have been told by directors and/or cameramen that they look better from this side than the other, and when they get power, they end up insisting that they should be photographed from that side. I would hate to work with someone like that. That would be a terrible pain in the neck for a cameraman and a horrible problem for a director, always having to stage for that, to make people walk around in a funny way in order to end up with her on the right and him on the left.
Beware also of actors who put on their own makeup. They’re not as consistent as the professionals. The makeup artist is the cinematographer’s ally. It is important to coordinate the makeup of the actors appearing in the same scene to avoid lighting problems.
Janusz Kaminski, cinematographer
Another thing that is disappearing today is the art of makeup. People don’t understand how the faces react to the light. You may have an actor who photographs magenta, then you get another one who photographs on a green side, and you get another one who is pale. And they are all in the same shot, and they just don’t look good. It used to be that there was one head makeup person and she or he would control everything that’s going on in the makeup room. Now you will get a star who has her own makeup person. Another star comes also with his own makeup person. You do the test and you will say, “Well, the actor is magenta, so he needs special makeup.” Now the actor will be asking, “Why is my makeup greenish?” Well, it is because the DP says that you photograph very magenta. Now the actor becomes self-conscious and you finally give up. “Let it go! We’ll fix it later.” So you end up putting green gels on the lights, trying to control the makeup, which is not good when you have three or four different actors in the scene.
Lighting for Skin Tones
The true test of a cinematographer’s lighting skills comes when he or she has to deal with actors vastly differing in their skin tones. When a multiracial cast appears in one scene, the brightness range considerations are tremendous. On top of that, different skin textures require different amounts of light.
John Alonzo, ASC
You have to consider different variations in color among black people. You have some black people who have a lot of blue that comes out of their skin, so you have to use a warm light and eye light to change it. There are some black people who have very, very reddish-brownish skin. You may use a piece of half-blue on the lights just to bring them back to balance, but when a black person and a white person are standing next to each other, it is not a matter of adding more light to a black person; you need to take light off the white person.
Conrad Hall, ASC
As a cinematographer you have to deal photographically with people of different skin colors in one scene. If the black skin is absorbing the light, you have to put some lotion on the skin to create a reflective quality. As soon as you have moisture, you have the reflective quality. Then, when you have some light bounced off the white card behind you, a black person’s skin will reflect the quality of that light. You will get exposure without adding any more light. It is a question of makeup. I do not do anything different for black people than I do for white people except when somebody’s skin is dry and has no reflective quality.
James Plannette, gaffer
One of the great fallacies about lighting black people is that you have to light them on a kick angle in order to see them. What happens is that you light a black surface, whether it is a face, or a wall, or a piano. Anything like that with either a kicker or a backlight will, as a surface, go blue. If you light somebody with black hair, his hair turns blue. So then if you put an amber gel on the light, it becomes normal again. The only thing that black people need is more light. It is as simple as that. It doesn’t have to
come from any particular direction. It just has to be more.
There are all sorts of skin tones. When you photograph children, they don’t require nearly as much light as adults. Children tend to be very fair, so using your meter on a child or a black person is ridiculous because it does not matter what the meter says. So, you light somebody who’s got sort of an average white skin tone and you balance the other by eye. The problem is when, for example, one of us here is black and the other is not and now we are photographing the scene and we got the balance just right and all of a sudden, for some reason, we switch chairs. Big problem! Say that I am a white person. My light is covered with a silk and your light is open. And then we switch; this silk comes off and another one on the opposite lamp comes on. Silk generally will do it.
Such light change may also be created with dimmers if the color shift caused by dimming is acceptable.
Robert Baumgartner, cinematographer and gaffer
Dark skin absorbs light much more, so it can handle direct light much better than fair skin. In some situations when you have two actors in the same frame with very different complexions, I like to use a 150-watt Dedo with a focal spot, which helps raise the level of light on the actor with the darker complexion. Because the rate of absorption is so much more, neither the eye nor the camera registers the additional light, but the balance of skin tones is clearly more photographic.
Dion Beebe, ASC
Lighting a face or an object often becomes as much about the light that is projected onto the subject as the light that is reflected off it. Skin, like paint or fabric, has a natural sheen and texture to it, and with any surface you can choose to throw light onto it or reflect light off it. Sometimes we need to think of the reflective nature of our subject rather than simply thinking about pointing lights at it.
John Buckley, Gaffer
Lighting dark-skin faces, some people like to use a rosy pink color gel just to warm it up a bit, or a quarter CTO. Sometimes yellow works really well. It just depends on the color of a darker skin.
Robert Elswit, ASC
The wonderful thing is that the darker-complexioned people are, the more they reflect the light. And I think that is the secret. Lighting a black face is similar to lighting a black car, because it is reflection.
Mauro Fiore, ASC
Sometimes I try to put black actors closer to the light source, just from the choice of blocking. I don’t believe in lighting black skin with warm light. There are as many different shades of dark skin as there are of white skin. Some people are a little more brownish, some people are very blue. For some reason there was a traditional treatment of black skin. It had to do with warm light. That’s why golden reflectors were invented. For me it seems very strange, because the light outside doesn’t really change. When you are dealing with black skin, it is a little bit more about reflectance than incidence, so treat black skin more as a reflective surface, rather than what is on the meter.
Close-up Accessories
When lighting faces we have to deal with hairstyles, with wardrobe, and particularly with eyeglasses.
James Crabe, ASC
Eyeglasses are really tricky. I think it is really important that the cameraman on the movie make sure that he sees the glasses people are going to wear before the picture starts. Maybe he could drop in a couple of words about hairstyles too. Lots of times the hairstyle is so elaborate or wild that you cannot see the actress from a profile position.
Glasses can be a problem, particularly with big soft sources that are low and close to the lens. Almost all of these glasses are convex. I find that sometimes you can bend the glasses a tiny bit forward or sometimes lift them off the ear just a little bit. It is of course a big pain to the actor and nobody has much sympathy with you at these moments when suddenly there is a massive reflection in the glasses and the director wants to shoot. With Marlon Brando on The Formula, John Avildsen, who directed the picture and who had been a cameraman himself in the past, had Marlon Brando there bending his glasses. Marlon was very cooperative about the glasses problem, but he asked Avildsen, “How does Woody Allen make a movie?” If you are working with a specular light, hard light, and the key is very high up or very far to the side, then you get shadows of the glasses’ frame itself on the eyes. You try to add eye light and then, of course, it is right in the middle of the glass if it is near the camera lens. So I think that it is important to check those things in advance. In the old days you would take the glass out of the lens, but nobody believes that anymore. Sometimes we use flat glass. It gives you a little bit of a break because it does not reflect as large an area, but if you do go through the light, then you really see it. The whole surface flashes on and off. It can be interesting. It is a difficult problem. The best that you can do is to get the key light as far up or as far around as you can get it without creating other problems. Sometimes glasses have to be pushed up to the face a little more or bent or played around with a little bit. I never tried anything like a pola screen on the source and a pola screen on the lens. You might be able to totally eliminate the reflections, but of course that is not being realistic. Nobody has that kind of time anyway.
When a best compromise between the use of glasses and the most advantageous lighting has to be worked out, the production company will go to great lengths to provide the right glasses. Anything around the face can distract the eye.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
On the last picture we had a glasses specialist. He had a kit full of glasses and he would shape them and bend them. They were flat and curved and had matching frames to work with. It may be as critical as that. If you are trying to make an actress look as pretty as possible, you want to put light in the most advantageous places. Glasses restrict the actor in relation to lighting because of all the reflections. But it gets to a point where worrying about glasses is not worth it if it restricts the actor too much. After three or four retakes of light reflections in the glasses, the actor loses his patience with it.
Russell Carpenter, ASC
Hopefully the actress is not insisting on wearing her own glasses and before production she’s picked up a pair of glasses from the prop people which is coated with an antireflection coating. I have had problems with glasses. Usually what I do is bring a smaller source in closer, and then I’ll find that maybe if I bring this source to the side and have a source with a medium-size Chimera, or if I just raise that source, the problem is taken care of. The antireflection coating knocks out about 80 percent of reflection from the glasses. The bigger problem is when the person is insisting on wearing wraparound glasses. I may then modify my light and make it look like a window when reflected. When someone insists on wearing glasses that are difficult to light, I do have to alert the producer or the assistant director that we are going to spend some time every time when it comes to this actor wearing this pair of glasses.
M. David Mullen, ASC
You will find that when people wear eyeglasses, you generally put the light a bit higher than the eyes to keep the light from being reflected. When actors talk to another performer in a scene, they tend to look across at the actor but occasionally glance downward, so if you light from below, they will catch the light more often in the glasses than if you lit from above the eyes. But of course, it all depends on the staging of the scene. If the actor is sitting and looking up at an actor who is standing, then you’re probably safer with a light that is lower than the eyes, not higher.
James Crabe, ASC
When you are doing close-ups of people, you see their hat, you see their collar, you see their tie, anything that comes within close proximity is very important to deal with. Often in films now the wardrobe person will come to a cameraman and say, “Well, these new nurses’ uniforms are all polyester and we cannot tech them down, we cannot gray them down.” This happens all the time, so you say “OK,” but it can be difficult, particularly if the problem encroaches on the face.
One solution is to cut a hole in the diffusion material to le
t more light through the middle. This brings up the face a little more than the light-colored dress.
Eye Light
The eyes are the windows of the soul, as the saying goes, and great care is taken to show the eyes of the protagonists. It is often necessary for the dramatics of the scene.
Caleb Deschanel, ASC
Sometimes you may not need to see the eyes to tell the story, and then you may have other actors like the one I remember on The Black Stallion. We had this Italian actor in the poker game scene who came up to me and told me that he acted with his eyes. It was very important that we see his eyes. You do alter things to some extent based on the things you need to see. It is possible to use a hard light just to create a little dot in someone’s eye, which brings out the eyes even if it does not create any exposure. You can bring the eye out of the darkness without increasing the exposure on the eye itself, because of the reflecting property of the eye.
Film Lighting Page 26