Page 50 - Lighting the Un-lightable Volume 1 #3

So, lets get started with out analysis. If you are familiar with our methodology, you know that wherever we are and what-
ever we are doing, we always ask ourselves five basic questions - these questions tell us everything we need to know about how
to set our cameras and how to light a space.
1 What Day is it? March 21, 2014
2 Where am I? Vegas.
3 What time is it? It was about 1:00 PM - there was no sunlight since we were in a conference hall.
4 What is the angle, direction and intensity of light? The only light was directly down from the ceiling.
5 What is the volume of light? This is the most critical part of the equation. The consistency of the volume of light
is key to understanding the tonal range in the space where we are working. Digital cameras "see" color, or inter-
polate color based upon their perception of the tonal range. The greater the tonal range, the more problematic
the scene becomes for the camera. So, the goal is to make the volume of light as consistent as possible. It doesn't
matter whether the volume of light is high or low, as long as it is consistent. The volume of light was extremely
consistent in this scene. It was almost black everywhere - consistent but too dark to effectively create images.
There were other things we needed to keep in mind as well. Throughout the day, there would be people watching us.
This further limited where we could place the lights. The ceiling over the area where we were working was white as well. If we
weren't careful, this would create unexpected "hot spots" on the models, or, when we were using the settee, we would lose detail,
or there would be excessive shadows to address in post processing. However doable that is, there is no substitute for "getting it
right in the camera."
Remember too: The more "natural" a scene looks, that is the more a scene looks like it was created with ambient light,
the greater the emotional impact an image will have. So, whatever we did, we had to make sure we kept the shadows as natural
as possible.
There would be two distinct scenes as well - one would have a light colored backdrop, mostly blues and whites and grays,
and the other, which you can see in the photo on the previous page, was "grunge" - largely brown tones. For the grunge look we
wanted more dramatic shadows as well.

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