BOOK REVIEW: “How to Shoot Movies Without Shooting Yourself in the Foot”

This book is not for everyone. If you don’t eat, breathe and live cinematography… maybe you should read something else. Seriously. This book may not be for you. (But if it is… you’d better not miss it.)

LIGHTING STRATEGIES: Placing the Fill Light for Faces

In this article I wrote about classical key light placement and classical portraiture to illustrate how artists and cinematographers have traditionally gone about lighting faces. Fill light is often derided as the light that simply opens up the shadows, but it can do much more than that. It can have a shape and beauty all its own, and it can save you when your key light placement is not optimal.

LIGHTING STRATEGIES: What Makes Soft Lights Cast Soft Shadows?

It’s one thing to understand that soft sources make soft shadows. It’s another thing to understand why. Fortunately a friend from the insect world can help us if we will look at soft light through his eyes.

LIGHTING STRATEGIES: Soft Light vs. Hard Light

In a previous article I described how to place a hard key light. In this article I’ll look at why soft sources are a bit more realistic in color cinematography, require less precise placement, and can help define the volume of a space.

Pulse Width Modulation is NOT Your Friend

Here’s the deal: there’s this thing called “pulse width modulation,” and under certain conditions it doesn’t play well with rolling shutter cameras. Most of the time it’s no problem, but we don’t get phone calls from post when there’s no problem. Here’s how to avoid that phone call.

LIGHTING STRATEGIES: Placing a Hard Key Light

The most important thing you will ever learn about lighting is this: LIGHTING IS NOT A FORMULA. Learning about lighting, though, is a process of becoming aware, and in this first of many articles I’m going I’m going to try to increase your awareness of one specific thing per article. The more awareness you have the more easily you’ll be able to adapt your lighting to your circumstances because you’ll see, with your own eyes, what you need to do to make an image that satisfies your inner artist.

I think the best place to start is with classical key light placement. This knowledge is not something you will use verbatim as this is not a style that is in vogue at the moment. The underlying principles, however, should be of daily benefit.

The Simplest, Fastest Interview Lighting Setup—Ever.

For a long time my primary source of employment was shooting corporate marketing communications videos. As these consist primarily of “talking head” interviews, I tried every lighting setup I could think of to make people look their best quickly, as many of these shoots have tight schedules and not much turnaround time between interviews. This setup is the result of years of experimentation.

Fill Light: The Underdog of Lighting

The day I stop learning about lighting will be the day my EKG goes flatline. There’s an extraordinary amount to learn and absorb, and I doubt I’ll ever learn all of it. That’s okay, because it means I’ll never run out of new things to learn. My most recent fixation is on the one light many think about the least: the fill light.

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