Getting the exposure right...
Getting the exposure right...- special effects and filmmaking
I know it probably depends on what look you are going for, but do you have any examples of how you would/have set up the exposure for certain scenes to get it looking hi-quality? Any suggestions will be welcomed, as Im sure they will all come in handy at some time...
well, it depends if you're shooting film or video. but in either case, you usually expose for whatever it is you want white. for example, if you want someone with a white t-shirt to have detail in the shirt, you expose for the shirt. if you expose for dark pants or even for the face, the white shirt will get blown out and no detail shown.
for video, i typically mess with the exposure so that only the 100% white is white. very few things are 100% white. you'll notice that if you have a shiny white ball, the highlight will be even whiter than the ball. expose for the highlight of the ball, not the ball itself. if everything else seems to be too dark, bring the exposure up one or two notches.
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i may not have the right idea here, but for example if you're filming a night scene, film it in the late afternoon, then you can darken it the puter, i know in Contact they filmed a scene on a house balcony in the middle of the day and had it altered a lot digitally to make it look like late night. that way, you don't get the graininess you normally get filming in the dark. you can expose normally and altere it to set the mood you want.
Sketch you're talking about compromise exposure. Usually you expose for whatever part is most important. On an acor this tends to be the face. If you feel that something on the actor is kicking back too much light and will be overexposed, flagg light off of that object instead of exposing for that object. If you always expose for that object then the other areas will be dark, and instead of your eye being drawn to the impotant parts they will be drawn to the shirt or jewlery or whatever you were exposing for.
Film and video lighting are all about light to darkness contrasts. Thats one of the reasons that many people prefer film to video is because at the moment film still has a better light to dark contrast ratio...
Anyway- Basically when you light a scene there is going to be a ton of light. Even the areas that you want to be "dark" in your shot are going to have lots of light. The trick is that the liught areas of your picture will often be a few stops brighter then the "shadow" areas.
This is called contrast. Before you begin lighting your scene you need to pick a contrast ratio. IE: will the shadowed areas be 1 stop darker or 2 stops darker or 3 or 4... This is what you use to create your mood... If you're doing film noir, you might choose a darker 8:1 as opposed to a christmas film where everyone is warm and happy, which you'd do 1:1 or 2:1... once you've done that light your scene so that is has this ratio... Then, you take your exposure reading from the area of light that you want exposed properly as I said before... Everything else will fall into place... DON'T FORGET that you will also have to worry about background and other object in the scene. You don't ant a completely blak background and you also don't want a glowing white background. Think of films like blade runner, even in it's darkets areas there are still slightly visable elements that interest our eyes... hat you also need to look for is areas that are too "hot" these are areas that might have too much light on them and will appear glowing white next to your main subject. The brighter an object the more our eyes tend to look at it, so it's best that you find these areas and flag light off of them, or remove them entirely.
Film lighting is a complicated subject, feel free to email me if you have any questions, but the if you want to learn a lot about it, pick up a few books. One I like is called Lighting for Film and Video by Dave Viera. It's a really good book. The best teacher though is experience, so grab a camera some film and practice 
[This message has been edited by Gamecat (edited 12-06-2000).]
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