In the case outlined above, Howe used arcs, hard lights to create the impression of the sun, also a hard source. The soft light of the sky can also be augmented with the use of soft lights or bounced light. As Howe points out, however, this kind of “magic” can be used only in tight shots when matching to daylight. Long shots are the most difficult to doctor.
The long shots should be photographed within a reasonably short period of time so that they can be intercut without a noticeable light change. Close-ups can always be helped with proper staging and additional lighting. Especially in the late afternoon when the light is fading fast, it is essential to get all the long shots in time. Another fact worth paying attention to is the ugliness of the very vertical sunlight between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. in the summer. This depends of course on the latitude of the location. When the sun is high, the landscape looks flatter, woods and water look dead. Once the scene is limited to a smaller area, we have much more control over the lighting. We can use large overhead frames with a variety of materials to modulate the sunlight. A black net scrim will cut its intensity, a white silk will soften it, or a black solid will create a shadow. Depending on the size of these frames and the height at which they are set up, they will produce a stronger or weaker effect. The reason to use silk rather than plastic for the overheads is that the air goes through silk, whereas plastic in a 12 × 12 ft. frame acts like a sail and the wind can rip it right out.
Large overheads and flags allow for considerable modulation of the daylight.
Richmond Aguilar, gaffer
On an overcast day there is a lot of top light. You can use a large flag, bring it down over the head, just enough to where it cuts down the top light. Now you have the light hitting the subject from the sides. Once you decide which side you want to be the key, you bring in another flag and ease it in on that opposite side to bring it down to the level where you want your fill light. Then you have a beautifully lit shot. People call it subtractive lighting or negative lighting. It is taking light away instead of adding it.
But you have to consider what your background is. If you are shooting against a wide open wheat field, and you are under the trees, you have this overcast situation. When you start taking this light off, you may have f/2.8 in the shade but very hot elsewhere. Shooting into the dense greens in a backlit situation, you can get away with a lot less fill light, because the backlight of the sun becomes just a rim on the shoulders and head and it can be way overexposed. It can be burned out. And you fill with enough exposure to balance them against the background, which is dark backlit trees. Then you can use just beadboards, no lights at all, very little fill, and still you will balance it with your background.
Now, if this whole situation is turned around, if the sun is hitting them in the face, now you have to bring out arcs to bring up the dark side of the face, because it is fully lit and the background is also fully lit. So if you have to shoot scenes without big equipment, you try to use backlight and fill minimally with the bounce boards. When you have to have one person in the sun and one backlit, usually it is the guy that suffers, the girl would have the backlight, a nice soft effect, and the guy will have a harsh high sun and lots of fill light. But you can cheat that around [have both people shot in the backlight] and get away with it.
Harsh lighting on the foreground can be either diffused by silk or broken up by shadow-forming devices, such as a cucoloris.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
Foreground you can manipulate with nets, silks, and solids. You can also use foliage effects and shadows. A silk between the light and the cucoloris will make the effect more subtle. Adjust the cucoloris and the silk, moving them closer and farther away from the light and the subject. Silk allows you to have a cucoloris closer to the subject and still soft. Otherwise, close to the lamp, it would give a gigantic shadow.
Shiny board reflectors are used here to bounce the sunlight into the building.
Another tool for using natural light is the reflector. Traditionally the film industry used silver reflectors called shiny boards with one side semimatte and the other bright and harder. Today they are rarely used to light faces but are still useful.
Allen Daviau, ASC
Shiny boards are really wonderful for bushes and buildings. If you are shooting a backlit situation and you’ve got back-rimmed people, the bushes and trees behind them will look like black holes. So you will use the shiny boards for this background and it will open up the greens, or you can shine a shiny board on a silk in such a way that the light will not travel directly through the silk but will light up the silk so it glows, and the silk becomes the source, not the shiny board.
Ralph Woolsey, ASC
The advantage of silver is its reflective efficiency, and there are many degrees of reflectance available in materials today, many of which you can get in long rolls. But if you want something really soft, use a piece of foam core clipped over a reflector. White reflectors, which produce very beautiful light, require working quite close to the subject, which you cannot do on long shots. For close-ups I often use a white card to redirect the light from a silver reflector, to create perhaps a backlight or sidelight effect in appropriate situations.
Sometimes, especially on exterior commercials, you may use a mirror to direct a narrow beam of light; for instance, in an outdoor luncheon scene where you want to get a special sparkle out of a glass of iced tea. You are working at a pretty high key light on a bright day, even through silk or other diffusion. So where ordinary lights are not bright enough or small enough to do it, I find that a fairly small, round, easily obtainable mirror is just the thing. It can throw a tremendous light for a long distance, and it can be fastened to a grip stand and adjusted.
Daylight consists of a mixture of sun and blue sky. Yet silver reflectors mainly reflect the sun, creating light which is often too yellow. For much cooler light, metallic blue surfaces can be used, or silver reflectors with a blue gel in front. On the other hand, golden reflectors will create more of a sunset effect.
Today, for lighting faces, white boards like the foam core and white plastic sheets like UltraBounce or Griffolyn are invariably preferred when reflected light is employed.
Allen Daviau, ASC
On an overcast day in winter, the Griffolyn with no artificial light bouncing off it, just the sky light, will give half a stop on the faces, just using it as a big white bounce card. For people on horseback it is great because you have the upward angle reflecting the sky. Also as the daylight gets down, we start bouncing our HMIs off it and getting just that little kiss of fill light to put the highlights in the eye and add a little detail into the face. What is beautiful about Griffolyn for the location pictures is that it folds up and stuffs into a bag just like silk. It is rugged, it can be rained on, you can wash it off with a hose.
All reflectors have their problems. They need to be continuously adjusted because of the moving sun, and they are easily upset by the wind. Lamps are much more dependable.
Among the lamps used in a daylight exterior situation, the large 12/18K HMI lights are the workhorses of the industry. Various incandescent lights are used on an exterior location as well. The large clusters of sealed-beam lights such as nine-lights or twelve-lights (maxi brutes) are very useful for general fill illumination or as a key light on an overcast day. They have to be filtered with blue gels unless they are equipped with fay (daylight) bulbs. Both these alternatives have their drawbacks. The blue gels, such as full CTB, cut down the light output by more than half. And the fay bulbs are very expensive per hour of use. By comparison the 5600K HMI lights are several times more efficient and actually less expensive to use. HMI lights may need some slight color correction as well. It is a good practice to check all the lamps in the morning with a color temperature meter and label the required gel corrections on each light.
Artificial light with correct color temperature for daylight will help to clean up a color cast created by an adjacent color; for example, the green lawn the actors a
re sitting on or a red fire engine nearby. Lights used to bring up the light level on an overcast day or under an overhead are generally referred to as booster lights.
Sunlight is a harsh source, and if we wish to use it as such without diffusion, then it is best used as three-quarter cross light or direct backlight. A problem arises with a dialogue scene in full sunshine. Logically speaking, if one person is in a backlight, the other one should be facing the sun. Traditionally the one in full sun would most likely be protected by a silk or a scrim and the one in the shadow would be given light from one side to see the detail, and this side would be balanced against the fill light. Being against the sun, his backlight would be stronger and you would usually cut it down with a net or silk.
There is another way to handle such a scene when the background is not too obvious.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
Just think of a situation when you are lighting people flat from the front and you are giving them full exposure. Now you turn around for the reverse. Logically, actors in this reverse shot are backlit, the light is behind them. But if you follow what the eye sees (what is correct in reality), the film would not cut. It would jump, from a very bright shot to a dark one. It would not match. Owen Roizman did a good job on this problem in Absence of Malice. He did exactly the same as Nestor Almendros does. He turned people so their backs were to the sun in both the master and the reverse shots. I would be very, very cautious with this approach. But it worked for Roizman. Everybody was always backlit. I could accept that, because if a scene is played around midday, the sun is very high in America, so, in a way, everybody is backlit. In real life the midday sun casts an overly strong light on the nose, but that is where realistic photography differs from naturalistic. You do not have to follow nature that closely. You can change it so there is no harsh light on the nose and you can get away with it.
Sun, as a backlight or three-quarter cross light, is also more interesting for the background. As James Wong Howe pointed out in an interview, one can introduce some smoke effect like burning green leaves in the woods or garden and use the sun as a backlight. It will give a marvelous three-dimensionality to the scene. The angle of the direct sunshine varies tremendously depending on the time of day and the geographical location. The high angle during the middle of the day produces a very unpleasant and unbecoming light, yet there are times when the story requires these conditions.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
The final scene of High Noon had to be shot at high noon, even though light at that time is really horrible. Nobody likes to work at midday because the light is so bad, but since the story required it, they had to shoot it in bad lighting whether the cameraman liked it or not. Sure, they could have shot it at sunset, but it would be funny to call it High Noon.
When the story does not demand to be shot in the middle of the day, early morning and late afternoon are really the best for the long shots. The shadows are long and the textures are more accentuated.
Mornings tend to be more crisp, assuming that there is no fog. In late afternoons the air is more polluted, making the light softer and more orangey. This color shift is caused by the fact that the blue waves become more scattered by the impurities in the air and the light spectrum shifts toward red.
Around sunset the Kelvin rating of light goes down to the point where it is possible to remove the 85 filter and in this way gain two-thirds of a stop. But if we do that, the photographed scene may be actually illuminated by 3200K light and the effect of sunset will be gone. When an exaggerated sunset is asked for, the cinematographer may actually use two 85 filters to double the effect.
SUNSET
How to photograph a sunset really depends on several factors: the focal length of the lens, the clouds, the air pollution, the geographical location.
James Crabe, ASC
A smoggy day would help you. I’ve shot many commercials where the guys are standing against the sun; in fact, a Marlboro commercial where the guy is right inside the sun. Sometimes we used to do a lot of work with long lenses. We would have gel filters behind the lens and quite often they would just burn up in the camera from the sun. It is just like the microscope focusing all that light. But often I had shot at f/22 with maybe three stops of ND. Often the effects that we go for graphically in sunset situations are silhouettes, people silhouetted against the red sky. If the shot was pretty close to the sun, as on a 600mm lens, I think the sun would be about 50 percent of the frame height, more or less. Of course one hopes to be able to photograph the sun on the horizon. The lower the sun is in the sky, the more atmosphere you are shooting through and the more chance you’ve got of getting a reproducible thing.
We have done stuff where we wanted to include the sun in a shot of a model; for example, where there is no sun. In this case we would take a great mirror and put it behind this person at a proper angle, and we can put the sun right behind her and the mirror probably doesn’t even change the exposure. The mirror would have to fill the frame. It would be shot with a long lens so the sun would be very large compared to the subject’s head, for example. You can also put a big piece of a neutral density gel between the actress and the mirror, so you have a little bit of balance; you can take the sun down two stops. That has to be done pretty much by eye, because there are really no rules. But I can remember a lot of times shooting the sun with a 600mm lens stopped down to f/22 and then even a couple of stops over that corrected by ND as well. On wider shots I had sometimes looked at the sky and said, “OK, what part of that sky should look like a flesh tone in density? Just take a reflected light reading from that part of the sky.” Also I know that with an incident meter, lots of people feel that you turn this meter around and aim the bulb the “wrong way,” away from the sun, and that will give you a good sunset exposure.
Of course a good sunset exposure would be different from a good sun ball exposure. Because in a good sunset exposure the sun might in fact be burned out but still give you a nice gradation in the sky. I found that out just by intuition, without making a lot of tests or bracketing exposures. The sun has generally been pretty cooperative. When it is blaring, blazing sun and totally undiffused sky, the color of the sun is not likely to be too pleasing either. If, however, you can shoot on a smoggy day, then you’ve got a beautiful oriental painting where the sun is orange. If I was going to do any filtering at all in the usual sunlight situation, I would just throw in another 85.
Some of the fun we had on these Marlboro commercials in the old days, when a lot of them were done against the sun and the whole scene had to be shot in fifteen to twenty minutes, was trying to find a place where the sun was going down over a rolling hill. We started at the bottom of the hill, and as the sun comes down, we are coming up the hill, moving fast, shooting fast, grabbing the tripods, great fun. It was sometimes done with a 1000mm lens, when a cowboy comes into the middle of the sun. Here again the guy is in silhouette, we are not getting any detail out of him at all. And we also shot late in the day, so the sun was in fact photographed through a lot of atmosphere. It looked beautiful to the eye and it looked beautiful to the camera. It was usually exposed at f/22 with a couple of stops of ND in there.
Exposing sunset, like exposing anything else, involves an aesthetic judgment and an understanding of how the exposure will affect the reproduction of the scene on film emulsion.
Caleb Deschanel, ASC
Basically everything moves around medium gray. Any reflected meter is going to give you medium gray, the middle of the scale. So if you take a spot meter and you read the sun, and it says f/22, well, you obviously want it to be hot. What I do basically is I look at the scene and I try to make a judgment about what I am seeing. I say to myself, Well, that is hotter than what I see as medium gray and therefore I should overexpose that a certain number of stops. You look at the color of the sun and you say to yourself, How much of the color do I want to preserve? If I overexpose the sun four stops, I am going to lose all that orange light. So I want to overexpose it, say, t
wo stops and I will still preserve some of that orange light. I just go within those ranges, but basically it is sunset. You can take a Weston meter and read the sky and get an accurate reading.
What is a sunset? Sunset in a desert can be totally different than in a smoggy city where you can have it go down and in the last thirty minutes you get this huge orange ball which is not all that hot. Only maybe two stops hotter than the surrounding sky. If the sun is just small in the frame, you go for one exposure, and if it is a 500mm lens, you would go for another exposure, because it is filling more of the frame. You can overexpose more if the sun is small in frame, because it is just going to be white anyway, whether it is eight stops overexposed or one stop overexposed. It is just small in the frame, so you certainly want to make sure that the sky is at a density that is hot. Because the sky is hot. It goes back again to the judgment of what you see. If I go to the desert and I look at a sunrise before the sun comes up, that is very hot and I think that you need to preserve that to some extent. You do not want to go more than say three or four stops over, or else it is going to blend in with the sun and you are not going to have any density, but it’s certainly got to be two stops hot or one and a half stops hot.
Film Lighting Page 28