Hi all,

Let me start by saying I don't have a lot of experience with lighting.

I'm shooting a subject on a black background next week for the purpose of an instructional type video. I have a 4x4ft (edit: 4x4 meters) black backdrop, 2x 600 LED lights and 1x 300 LED light.

In theory a basic 3-point lighting setup should do the trick. But I'd like to get it right the first time, so does anyone have any tips of tricks that might be of benefit?

Thanks in advance :)

Jody,
Get more black material so you can make sure your subject and your lighting is far enough away from the background so the light doesn't spill onto the background. Also flags and black wrap help with this. Controlling the environment you are shooting in also helps. Good luck.

Also rim lighting from the rear will help with separating the subject from the background.

You do have some options here.

A hair light or even any light (a lamp on the floor out of frame, even) from the back will create separation. That is probably a good option.

The rest depends on the look you want. You could light from the sides, with a light on their left (at a 90 degree angle) and a reflector or softer light from the right at a slightly forward 45 degree angle. This is more common in portrait style shoots and will keep light off the backdrop.

This will give you some ideas that still apply to video:6 simple lighting setups for shooting portraits at home (plus free cheat sheet) | Digital Camera World - page 7 (http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2013/04/03/6-simple-lighting-setups-for-shooting-portraits-at-home-free-photography-cheat-sheet/7/)

It's critical to control the spill from your lights. Unfortunately, LED arrays splatter light in all directions.

A dark room and distance between subject and backdrop improves things. I agree, a 4x4 is small for anything more than a shoulder shot if that.

If you are in a less than ideal situation, experimenting with your camera may help you find a color profile gamma setting that has hi contrast at the expense of dynamic range but ....

The backdrop is 6' away in this example.

Hi Jody,

They are correct. 4X4 is nowhere near enough background. You will not be able to get the distance you need for 3 point or rim lighting. And even matt black looks bad when light spills on it. The only way to make it a deep black is to move your subject far enough forward to avoid any spill on it.

Do you have barn doors, flags, or other control items for your LEDS? If you don’t here is a link for the black wrap Daniel mentioned:

cinefoil | B&H Photo Video (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=cinefoil&N=0&InitialSearch=yes&sts=ma&Top+Nav-Search=)

It may look expensive for foil but it is worth every penny. It is durable enough to be reused so it will last you a while. It is a great place to start.

A 4x4 backdrop is going to be very frustrating for you. Have you tried it yet?

I have a couple of LED lights but I am in no rush to replace my Lowell kits. Why, because in addition to the kits with various types of lights I have a Lowell case I bought empty on e-bay. The whole case is full of tools and accessories that I use in conjunction with my lights. To me, good lighting is about how you direct and control the light. Big square LED panels are not as versatile as Soft boxes, tota lights, omni lights, and pro lights. And please understand I am not knocking anything. I am just stating my opinion about the big rush by some guys to go all LED. I like my tungsten, even with their warts 

I love to do lighting. You said “I don’t have much experience but I want to get it right the first time”. Don’t make the shoot your first time. Set up your stuff now and work out the kinks before you arrive on the shoot.

Steve

Everyone posted up what I was going to mention in one form or another. Get a larger backdrop if you can, and do your best to separate your subject from the background. I usually try to go for the largest backdrop we can get, and then pull the subject and camera as far away from the background as you can. This lets any uncontrollable spill fall off rather well, and lets you light the BG independently of the subject.

If you are looking to get everything done in camera, you will obviously be limited by how much distance you can get from the backdrop and keep everything framed accordingly, but you could also move out quite a bit even if you show non-backdrop elements and then mask accordingly in AE or which ever application you prefer.

Using this trick you could just move the person out as far as you can with your current 4x4 and then throw a mask over any extra BG elements and fade the BG to black in post. This is usually very quick and easy as talking heads dont move much!

Oops, sorry guys I meant 4x4 meters (not feet). It's height adjustable starting from about 1.5 meters. This should be sufficient I'm assuming? It's quite a large backdrop, I got the biggest I could find.

The LEDs do have barn doors so I can control the light a bit. Is it recommended to diffuse the light? I don't have any soft boxes or gels, so would something like a white sheet draped over the light help?

Thanks for the tips anyway. I'm going to set it up tonight and practise getting the right look before the client arrives.

That sounds like it will work, longer focal lengths help (narrower field of view). Quality of light is more driven by the angle subtended by the light from the POV of the subject (closer=softer) and draping a sheet over the light would more likely contribute to spill.

Diffusion recommended? That depends on a lot of things, including the look your after. You said "instructional video". You can probably get by without diffusion. To soften those panels use distance. A light that is turned up full will be softer than a light at 50% power half the distance closer.

Can I use a sheet draped over the lamp? In theory yes......but for me, no. Since LEDS burn cool there a lot of things some guys do use. I know a guy that buys cheap plastic shower curtains and cuts them up. So you can experiment if you want to but I wouldn't. If you do, remember that anything you put in front of a source that is not made to be there is going to change the color temperature. If you don't do it to all of your matched lights you could end up with a crazy mix. And something like a white sheet is going to knock your output level way back. LEDs run softer than tungsten burners so I would start out with nothing first if you can not get some diffusion gels.

Jim, I wrote this and was about to hit post when I saw your new one. I believe it is the other way around....farther = softer. Distance can make your source larger....larger = softer.

Steve

Stephen, Jim had it correct--the closer a source is, the larger it is in relation to the subject and thus softer. Think of it this way: if you were to look at a 1x1 panel that is 6 feet away and another at 12 feet away, the one at 12 feet will appear smaller in size. Smaller sources are harder sources.

Regardless, a direct hard source is not going to soften much with the kind of distances we are talking about here. In most instances it is preferable to soft light a subject. With a large backdrop as described (4x4m), start by positioning the subject and camera as far away from the backing as possible without seeing off the edges. You could push the LED units through a sheet to diffuse it, or use a piece of white posterboard and bounce the LED into that. Not knowing what camera you are using--if it can shoot at at least 800 ISO you should be able to get enough exposure this way. Bounce light has a pretty fast falloff and with enough distance between subject and backdrop, you should be able to maintain a deep black back there.

A hair light when shooting against black is a matter of taste. I don't generally use them much, or if I do, on the subtle side. It depends if you are going for a "TV look". Black hair will require a bit of separation against the backdrop thus will benefit from a backlight, but with lighter hair and complexion, it's not necessary--again, matter of taste.

Three point lighting is not just about three light sources in location, it's about key, fill and backlight. LEDs are nice for soft light, but rubbish at creating shadows. Without shadows your lighting is bland and boring.

I would have to agree with Jim. The closer the source is, the softer is will be.

Also a close light at 50% power will be BRIGHTER and a 100% light at twice the distance. For the father light to be the same brightness, it would have to be at 200% power or only 1.414 (root 2) times the distance away. This is the inverse square law in operation.

All things considering your lights are covered well. so how about the space?

are you shooting during the daytime or night time? in a studio or non-video purposed space? If during the day, does it have good control over sun entering?

another trick you may be able to pull if for some reason you find yourself limited during the shoot...

if you're going for superblack, and still have some spill or other erroneous non-black object around the edge of your frame and not near the subject, you could potentially garbage matte it out, and drop your black levels to 0 IRE in post to have the transparent matte match the black in the shot.

this works great for white screen, but black tends to show more texture and might not be as easy to match, but is something you could play around with. typically will only work if the camera isn't moving nor the subject moving.

Broad sources do not follow ISL precisely. Instead, they act as an array of point sources, each of which follows ISL, and for each you could calculate a distance via Pythagorean theorem. It is possible to think of the broad source as a point source with an origin behind the actual position provided you know the beam spread (and apply a little trig), at which point you can apply an f-stop feet rule to calculate points at which intensity doubles, e.g. if 8 feet from the virtual point source yields f8 then 5.6 feet from the virtual point source yields f11.

Jody,
Make sure that you use "manual" iris and stop the lens down. If you shoot it in "auto" the camera will see that black background and think it needs to open up the iris too much, and overexpose your subject. Guaranteed. Good luck.

Kevin

There's already some really good advice on this thread, but I'll add:

Make sure you black balance the camera just prior to shooting so the blacks don't have any color tint.

And also make sure the master black levels are set correctly in the camera's menus or you'll end up with a dark gray background that will have to be dropped down in post. Many cameras are incapable of producing a true, 0 IRE, black with the factory default settings. Don't believe it? Put a lens can on a new Sony camera and check the levels on a scope. Black won't hit zero. I suspect other brands of cameras might be the same, but I have more experience with Sony. Just another example of why custom Picture Profiles are pretty much required for modern cameras.

I would also ask if black is actually a creative decision or if it was chosen because the location does not have a suitable "look". Black isn't very interesting for the viewer and I feel that it has a claustrophobic feel to it. Black is my absolute last choice for background options. Maybe consider shooting on green screen and dropping in a more lively background that is appropriate for the subject matter: http://www.instabackgrounds.com/

Stephen, Jim had it correct--the closer a source is, the larger it is in relation to the subject and thus softer. Think of it this way: if you were to look at a 1x1 panel that is 6 feet away and another at 12 feet away, the one at 12 feet will appear smaller in size. Smaller sources are harder sources.

Gentlemen,

First let me say I try hard not to post anything as advice unless I think I know exactly what I am talking about. I would never want to be a forum idiot that spreads rubbish. So I apologize to everyone if I made an erroneous statement.

Second, please help me wrap my head around this because light and distance is a concept I have practiced for many years. When it comes to “larger is softer concept” I have never thought of it in terms of applying fixture size in its literal dimensions to the concept. I was taught to think about ALL lighting in terms of the light coming from the fixture. What type of source it is and what happens to it after it leaves the source. I do not understand your concept of closer is larger, therefore softer. For simplicity, if you placed a bare bulb pro light at a 45 degree angle to a subjects face at two feet you would have harsh shadows. If you move that light back 10 feet on the same plane the shadows will soften. They will soften because the light rays have broadened and are no longer focused so intensely on the subjects face. Therefore, it could even be said that it is a larger source based on the spread of the beams. So what am I missing? I do not understand the concept of “closer is softer based on distance because the source is bigger”?

Steve

I am not very clear above. I do understand large vs small source is large is softer, small is not. The part I am not understanding is, how moving a source closer makes it softer? That has not been my experience.

That's not what happens - the further away a source is, the light reaching the subject from it is nearer parallel. The proof of course is to consider the sun - 93 million miles away, and when it hits an object ib#n the path to the subject the shadow is hard. A lightsource close, even a old fashioned tungsten lamp has a defined filament length where the light is produced, and this produces a quantifiable angle of light output, which means that the object creating the shadow will mask some of the light from the filament but not all, giving softer edges.

In fact the types of spotlight that can project a gobo are all better when they use a lamp with smaller filament. In the UK, historically our lamps have always had bigger filaments because of our higher voltage supplies, so our projections were not so sharp. There is also a very old design to project shapes - a Linnebach projector, and for these to be sharp, the filament had to be as small as possible.

So any source of light with an object interrupting the light on the way to the subject give sharper shadows as the distance gets bigger. That's how it works. Obviously an LED panel is a bigger source so softer still, but move one further away and the shadows sharpen again. Just down to angles and trigonometry really.

This could help http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbra

Hi Steve,

I'll try to explain. Your light bulb example deals with what is for all intents and purposes a point source or you can treat it as one since you have a small filament emitting light, and it's emitting light in pretty much all directions. If the light is 4 feet from the subject the intensity of the light per square inch is the total light intensity divided by the surface area of a sphere with a radius of 4 feet. If the light is moved to 5.6 feet the light intensity per square inch is the bulb intensity divided over a sphere of radius 5.6 feet and if you do the math the result should be half the 4 foot value. This is the essence of the inverse square law, distribution of the energy over a spherical surface. This has nothing to do with the quality of the light but it will be important when I get to broad sources. Assuming your bulb is in free space and the light is not reflecting off of walls etc., the light that is spread over a larger area as you state, but less of it is hitting your subject and only what are essentially parallel rays are hitting your subject in either case, thus the light is contrasty and of the same quality.

Now switch to a broader source like a 1x1 LED panel. Each LED can be thought of as a point source and the panel can then be thought of as an array of point sources. When the panel is close to the subject the distance of each LED to the subject varies per the pythagorean theorem - the LEDs at the edges provide less intensity than those in the center. Due to perspective and shape of the subject, some LEDs may illuminate an area not seen by other LEDs, while other areas might be illuminated by all the LEDs (cheek vs. front of face for example). Furthermore each LED that is off-axis from the center is illuminating the subject at more of an angle. One might not think of a 1x1 as a broad source, but the same logic applies to a 3x4 foot soft box.

Now start moving the LED panel away from the subject and a couple of things happen. First the ratio between the distance of the center and off-center LEDs from the subject approaches 1 (equivalence), and the light striking the subject from the LED panel becomes more parallel and thus harder or more contrasty. As the distance of the panel increases greatly it becomes effectively a point source.

The Sun is a good example. It's big but it's so far away you can think of it as a point source and it's light is considered contrasty/harsh, unless it's hitting a big soft box (cloud) or one of the California Sunbounce panels.

Paul & Jim,

Thank you, now I get it! That makes sense. And another light went on for me. I think what I was perceiving as softer light when you move a source farther away was a lessening of INTENSITY in the shadows. As you have explained so well, it is not softer. But the shadows are not as deep and dark (to me) so I was perceiving it as softer. And, unless you are shooting on a black set, lights farther back provide more opportunity for reflected fill light, also reducing shadow intensity. Does that make sense?

I guess I am lighting more from experience and instinct over technical science.


Steve

...I do not understand your concept of closer is larger, therefore softer. For simplicity, if you placed a bare bulb pro light at a 45 degree angle to a subjects face at two feet you would have harsh shadows. If you move that light back 10 feet on the same plane the shadows will soften. They will soften because the light rays have broadened and are no longer focused so intensely on the subjects face. Therefore, it could even be said that it is a larger source based on the spread of the beams...
If you have a small source, like a filament in an unfrosted tungsten bulb, it will always cast harsh shadows... but, as you move it further away from the subject, you'll increase your exposure to compensate.

As you increase exposure, you'll be keeping your facial highlights at perhaps 80 IRE, but you'll also be bringing up exposure in the shadow areas.

What is illuminating those shadow areas? Ambient light, or perhaps your bulb's reflections off walls, ceiling, tables, desks, floors, etc.

However, if you did this same exercise on a dark night, shadows on your subject's face would remain heavily shadowed. No ambient light, no reflective surfaces.

In this sense a hard source always remains a hard source... but what happens to the light after it leaves the source will vary with the environment.

Now, to a soft source: If you are the subject, and a 24" wide softbox is touching your nose, that's a very large, soft source. Measure it in degrees of width - let's say 140-deg. If you could get a camera in there you'd find no shadows.

Now let's move that softbox to a more typical position, 5' from your nose, 45-deg to the side, 45-deg above your eyeline. It's narrower, right? (measure in degrees) I don't have the math to tell you exactly how much, but what is important is the angular size of the source. In the dark of night with no other reflective surfaces in play, the further away the soft source is, the more it "hardens" because its angular size gets smaller.

Of course we don't do much shooting in perfectly non-reflective environments, but, the closer a soft source is, the more wrap there will be, the softer the falloff between highlight and shadow, and the more detail there will be in a shadow area.

OTOH, an instrument like a typical fresnel, leko, or open face is always a "small" and narrow source, and will tend to produce harsh shadows at any usual working distance... which may be softened by ambience or reflections, depending.

Thanks all! I spent a couple of hours setting it up last night, and ended up getting the exact look I wanted.

On another note, I just realised how bright my LED panels actually are, I needed them dimmed to 5% to get the correct exposure and not blind the subject.

All of your tips and info is really appreciated, thanks again :)

Hi Jody

Could you show us a still from the footage?

Hi Jody

Could you show us a still from the footage?

Sure. You'll have to excuse my ugly mug, my (much prettier) test subject has left for the day.

Any tips on how to perfect that shot? Keeping in mind framing & exposure might be a bit off since I'm in front of the camera, I just flicked over to full auto :)

Unless there's some creative idea driving it otherwise, I like the shoulders turned more and not so parallel to the sensor.

Thanks Jody, That looks good. You have chosen a fairly flat lighting style by the looks of it, but the subject is well delineated from a background that is solidly black.

I have also just seen Les's post and would agree with that too.

Thanks for that. You say the lighting style is quite flat. What techniques can be used to make it a bit more interesting?

If you change the power in one of the panels and meter for the higher output, you will effectively make the areas lit solely by the other panel dimmer or more in shadow.

I would suggest raising the power of one rather than lowering it as this is more likely to keep the background black.

This would be be the "key" light. The other light at the lower power is the "fill" light.

If you are having trouble with the power of the lights and exposure for the camera, just move the fill light further away from the subject and keep the same exposure.

Any value and looking at this "issue" sideways"? How about Blue/Green screening and subbing out to a controlled black levelled Graphic?

Doable?

Grazie

@jody when you evenly light a 3D object like a face, it makes it "flat" because it removes the shadows that help us see the 3D surface (eye sockets, nose, lips ...). If one side is brighter than the other, it leaves some shadows. The brighter of the two is from the Key light and the other from the Fill. The dimmer you make the fill, the more shadow you get and typically more dramatic feel. If the side facing the camera is the brighter side made by the Key, it's called shooting "On Key". If the side facing the camera is the fill side, it's called shooting "Off Key".

In my example, I am shooting On Key. Look at the cheeks. Her right cheek is dark vs her left. You also see nose shadow on the nasal labial area created by the Key and not "erased" by the opposing fill.

There's nothing wrong with shooting flat. Here's a great set of Black Void examples from interviews with documentary producers:
Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary (http://films.nfb.ca/capturing-reality/)

I'd suggest you raise the key light higher, so that shadows are cast downward rather than sideways.

Bear in mind that your subject may look differently in this light than you do, this typically has a lot to do with the depth of the eye sockets. My starting point for key placement is 45-deg to the sided and 45-deg up, which is then adjusted depending on those shadows, especially to the off-key side of the nose and off-key eye socket.

@Robyn ... tap tap tap.... what happened here? How'd it come out? How about some pics?