ProVideo Coalition.com: Stunning Good Looks by Art Adams

I’m a big fan of soft light from below, but students often resist this approach because it is supposedly “horror” lighting. As part of a basic lighting demonstration lighting teachers often show that hard light from directly below a face looks like something you’d see in an old Hammer horror flick, and everyone dutifully takes note that light from below the lens denotes evil.

When I was a camera assistant I worked a lot with a DP who lit a lot of scenes by putting foam core beneath the lens and bouncing light off of it. The result felt very natural and real, as if sunlight were coming through a window and bouncing off the floor.

I’ve gone through a lot of lighting phases in my career where I’ll try a style out for a while and then move on to something else. Right now I’m lighting a lot of shots with soft low light because, to me, it feels real and unlit, whereas light from above can feel artifical or predictable. I’m not a slave to this style and I do frequently light with sources placed above the lens height, but I do find a lot of situations where soft light from below is more interesting and believeable than lighting from above.

This guy could be sitting at a table in a restaurant, near a window where sunlight is coming in and pounding the table in front of him. He could also be sitting at a dinner table where an overhead light is bouncing off the table cloth. Back when I shot mostly corporate videos I found that the fastest way to light the traditional “We’re having a corporate meeting” setup was to hang a light over the conference table and aim it straight down onto the tabletop. I’d scatter some papers around to bounce the light onto the people, and then I could put the camera anywhere and get a decent-looking and realistic shot of anyone around the table without having to relight each setup or avoid shooting my lights. The tabletop looked a bit bright but people will buy that look in that environment.

Same thing here: maybe she’s lit by sunlight hitting a piece of paper she’s holding in front of her, or light is bouncing off the shirt of someone standing in front of her. There’s a famous scene in the film Peggy Sue Got Married where a nighttime basement scene is lit by one light coming through a window. It falls directly onto one of the characters in the scene but the other character is lit only by the reflected light bouncing off the first character’s sweater. When the characters move apart one of them recedes into darkness as the bright sweater moves away.

That’s one of the things that I love about soft sources: they can create a feeling of space. I’m not talking about massive sources that are used as shadowless fill or as a base light for a set; I’m talking about things like sunlight hitting a table or a character walking past a lamp with a lampshade. The soft vs. hard quality and brightness of a nearby soft light will change depending on how people and objects move in relation to it. If a room is lit by a single shaft of sunlight hitting the floor and a character is moving around the room outside of that shaft, the light falling on that character from the hot spot on the floor is going to change as they move around the room. The farther they are from the hot spot the less directionality there will be, but as they get close to the hotspot the bounced light will become brighter and much more directional. If they cross from one side of the room to the other they’ll go from being frontlit to being backlit or unlit.

Soft sources are a great way to define spaces. I call this kind of lighting “volumetric lighting” because it helps the audience feel the volume of a space. Hard sources tend not to do this so much as their character changes less as you move around them: they always cast sharp shadows, so the character may become brighter or darker and the shadows may shift as they move within the light’s beam, but there’s less feeling of movement in relation to the light source.

Let’s pretend our subjects have walked away from the sunlit surfacing they were sitting at:

Imagine this look happening in the same shot as the previous look: this is position two, and the previous images were position one. Can you get a sense of where these people are in relation to the lit surface they were sitting over a minute ago? Do you have a sense of where they are in relation to that surface?

Here’s what happens if we leave the light where it is and make it a small source:

That’s a very, very different look. You can get some sense of where they are in relation to the light source, but that’s a very harsh and artifical light source. That may be appropriate for your scene, and if so—use it!

As always, the ideas I’m expressing are guidelines only. I’m not dictating how you should light, only showing you the possibilities and how I interpret them artistically. Experiment, decide what you like, and then incorporate what you’ve learned into your own style.

Art Adams is a DP with a soft light touch. His website is at www.artadamsdp.com.

The Best of Stunning Good Looks

Art Adams | 08/30

A directory of my best articles, sorted by topic.

This entry is a guide to my best articles, sorted by topic. Enjoy!

NAB 2012: Assorted Snapshots

Adam Wilt | 05/08

A few cool things I saw at the show that didn’t fit into any other articles.

NAB is too big a show in too short a time to see more than a fraction of it. I’ve covered a few things in some depth (as have other PVC folks), but there’s plenty more that slips by without proper coverage. Here, I have a few photos…

NAB 2012: Trucolor Ohm Space Light

Bruce A Johnson | 04/20

400 watts of LED replaces a 6K? Sounds good to me.

Next time you need to flood a room with soft light - in whatever color temperature - you should give the Ohm a look.

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Great ideas about soft light. In previous articles you’ve described how you used fill on the same side as the key. I hope you’ll talk more about that.

I usually think of the key light being harder than the fill, but I suppose key and fill are more about the ratios rather than the quality of the light.

Posted by Rob on 12/23 at 08:41 AM

The fill light article is coming, probably next month.

I, personally, hate the terms “key” and “fill” because film schools have made them loaded terms. “Key” is supposed to be the light that shapes the set and gives it mood, but it’s not unusual to have multiple lights that have that feeling, or none. “Fill” makes a little more sense to me as it makes sense that you’d want to control the depth of your shadows, but fill can also have shape to it and can either cover the set or be localized to certain areas of the set.

If I taught a class in lighting I would eliminate the word “key” from the curriculum because I think it makes lighting too formulaic. The key doesn’t have to be harder, softer, more directional, less directional than the fill… all I can really say accurately is that it is traditionally brighter than the fill light. Other than that there are no rules.

In a set there are lights that are brighter than others that sculpt the space, and there’s usually some sort of light that makes the shadows as dark or as bright as you want them. That’s about it. The rest is up to your imagination. No light has to be harder or softer than another by definition, it simply has to look right to you and suit the director’s story.

I hope to write an article soon about a project I just shot for OnLive where I don’t think I can point to any setup and say “here’s the key light.” There’s “soft but directional back light from the window,” there’s “sunlight raking through the set,” but there’s not really a single light that I would define as a “key.” That’s not the way I think anymore, and I’m a better cinematographer for it.

And don’t get me started about lighting ratios. I think those are some of the most useless things ever. For example, if I lit a set to a 4:1 ratio (which is pretty low contrast these days, although it used to be the “standard” taught in film schools), how have I exposed it? If the key is T4 and the fill is T2, that would be a 4:1 ratio but that says nothing about whether I exposed the shot at T4 or at T2, or anything in between. I almost never expose a scene based on the “key” level: I prefer making flesh tones a little hotter or a little darker depending on what’s happening in the story or where I want people to focus their attention.

I think I’ll write an article on how to practice lighting by eye, but I’m going to save that for next week or the week after.

Meanwhile, if you want to see two very different lighting approaches used on very similar material, watch the original Star Wars (I think that’s now considered Episode 4) and The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars was shot in the 1970s by an old-school DP who used a lot of classical hard lighting and there’s are a lot of hard shadows and obvious key lights. The Empire Strikes Back was shot with very, very large sources and looks like it could have been shot yesterday: even though the lights are generally very large and soft they are no less powerful at creating mood and a sense of space. The two films were shot only a few years apart but the lighting in Empire is timeless, whereas the other feels very dated and is a great example of the older “key fill back light” style.

Here’s the trailer for the original Star Wars:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g3_CFmnU7k&feature=related

Here’s the trailer for The Empire Strikes Back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxLR_27ASpc&feature=related

The original Star Wars looks “lit” to me. Very little of it feels real or compelling. It’s completely adequate, but it doesn’t excite me.

The Empire Strikes Back’s lighting looks right to my eye: it’s rich but never feels inappropriate to the setting. Each setup is gorgeous but there’s no formulaic lighting here, only making each set look dazzling while remaining true to the story and the setting. Quite often the light sources are in the shot and you can feel them shape the space as people move past them.

(Man, those trailers look cheesy now. )

Posted by Art Adams on 12/23 at 11:36 AM

Thanks for the extensive answer. I watched the two trailers. The first seems like there are few deep blacks (except in space) while the second had more.

When you’re ready to teach that course, I’m ready to pay for it!

Posted by Rob on 12/23 at 02:07 PM

That’s part of it… I think the other part is to look at the quality of the shadows and the quality of the lights lighting the scene. The first has a lot of hard light from a distance, which tends to light things somewhat uniformly so that if you have a key side and fill side there’ll be two tones on the face, plus a scratch or backlight. In the second example the shadows are softer and there are a lot more tones in the image, not just a couple, and they change as people and things move through the environment. The light creates a sense of space or volume, whereas the first example the light does create some drama but doesn’t feel (to me, at least) like it’s part of the environment. The first feels lit, the second feels real—but still beautiful.

Posted by Art Adams on 12/23 at 02:12 PM

Great article, as always. Your articles are always eye openers of how to think when it comes to lighting.

There’s also a quote here:
“When I was a camera assistant I worked a lot with a DP who lit a lot of scenes by putting foam core beneath the lens and bouncing light off of it. The result felt very natural and real, as if sunlight were coming through a window and bouncing off the floor.”

That DP was Dean Cundey! I’m a huge fan of his and have heard you mention him doing it in a lot of your articles (actually how I found them). But this one really showed the nice thing about doing it very in-depth.

To me, that sort of lighting would work great anywhere, because as you say it’s very natural. Most light we see in our everyday lives comes from above, often from ceiling-lights or the sun. The first idea I had was an indoor scene at a table in a diner, with a top down light placed on the actors and then small fill placed on the table. Without the fill (and with a hard sourde) you’d get Gordon Willis style Godfather lighting, but with a softer key (probably a Kino or very diffused light) and fill from the table you’d get a lovely look that would feel very real.

This way of filling is also very effective for outdoor use. Most of the time your key outside is the sun, which comes from above. Placing fill underneath is simple, quick and gives again a great, natural look.

Last but not least, the part where I really realized how much of Cundey’s lighting came from below? It was when watching Seinfeld, in an episode where Newman, Kramer and Elaine go to kidnap a dog. They were sitting in a car at night, with a lot of darkness when Wayne Knight (who is Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park) light up a map with a flashlight, with the map held just below him. The light looked just like he did many times in JP!

Posted by Gabriel de Bourg on 02/03 at 04:04 AM

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LIGHTING STRATEGIES: Soft Light vs. Hard Light