moon lighting

[hmramachandraa]

can any one tell me how to creat moon light effect in out door. the film Iam shooting calls for pretty wide shot & low angle shots(ie.sky and the horizone in

the back ground)

[Nate Downes]

blue filter and underexpose during the daytime is a technique I've used in the past.

[stijnbarbe]

yeah, day for night could work, but I believe moonlight not to be blue but white.

well not really, really white either. It's a tricky color, the moon.

I use a 'white' lightsource, but dirty it up with a very light straw or the color that's required in the scene. anyway, I'd urge you to shoot at night, just for the fun of it.

[Matt Pacini]

The color temp of moonlight is in fact exactly that of sunlight, just dimmer. (It's just the sunlight reflected off the moon, remember?)

 

You can verify this if you take a 35mm still camera, open the shutter long enough to get the same exposure as you would during the day, & when you get your print back, you'll see that it looks identical to a shot taken at daylight (I've seen it, it really does!).

 

The reason for going blue for night scenes are two-fold:

 

1. The human eye is more sensitive to blue at low light levels, so we perceive nightime to be a bit in the blue, but certainly nothing near as blue as what you see in most films.

 

2. Because it's been used for a zillion years in films, even if it's not totally realistic.

So, just like many, many things in films, you don't necessarily want everything to be totally realistic. If everything in a film was realistic, it would be boring.

Real life is never as exciting as a movie, right?

 

Matt Pacini

[Jarin Blaschke]

I think it also appers somewhat blue to us because we often encounter it after our eyes have adjusted to incandescent illumination, around 2800K. But to me, moonlight is often so weak, the image before my eyes appears more monochromatic than anything else.

[John Pytlak RIP]

In very low light levels like moonlight, the scotopic "rod" vision is predominant, so colors look desaturated or even monochrome:

 

http://www.colourware.co.uk/cpfaq/q2-3.htm

 

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase...ion/bright.html

 

http://www.sylvania.com/forum/pdfs/faq0016-0297.pdf

[Tenolian Bell]

I don't like the strong blue look for moon light. I liked what Roger Pratt did in Troy a monochromatic silvery moonlight. Quite beautiful.

[Michael Nash]

Getting back to lighting, You'll want to find a way to get your light source as high up as possible. How high and by what means depends on the shot, the location and your budget.

 

Big budget productions will use a Musco truck or a Night Sun, basically a truck with a tall boom with multple HMI's on the end. A cheaper way is to rent a Condor, basically a boom on wheels with a bucket on the end where you can mount pretty much any light you want. You can also use scaffolding or rooftops to put lights up high. On a much smaller scale I've even put 1200 HMI pars on Mombo Combo stands, "full stick." If your shot is pretty wide you'll probably need to use multiple lights to cover the area rather than try to get one big light up high enough.

 

Usually you want to create backlight or edgelight, so that shapes are separated from the background but the fronts stay dark to preserve a feeling of darkness. But this rule of thumb can be bent any way you like for your purposes, as you may want to front-light objects in the distance or simply keep the light in place when you want to turn the camera around.

 

A quick trick I've used to create a softer moonlight glow is to put a 4x4' or 6'x6' bounce (angled downward) on the end of a Mombo Combo stand full height, and bounce a light up into it. Similarly you can put a frame of diffusion in front of a big light in a condor, or even build a "moonbox" hung from a crane.

 

Regarding color, there are many ways to go. Blue is certainly the convention, and to me about 1/2 blue really does look natural and realistic when underexposed a little. There's no right or wrong.

[hmramachandraa]

thank you all for your guidence

[Tony Brown]

yeah, day for night could work,

Not with the sky in shot...... for day for night to work (if it ever really does), you must avoid sky and reflections of sky.

[Marc Levy]

On night shots, does anyone have a number of stops under key level they find effective for underexposure? I understand this varies with the situation. Also, on the blue thing, this is from left field, but blue feels cooler, as does the night's temperature.

[Leon Rodriguez]

I have an article on Day for Night shooting that might help. It's dated but still applies. Hope it helps. http://www.cineshare.com/columns/techniques/dayfornight.htm