white execution room (in studio)

[Guest montaser abou saada]

its a 4X5 M execution room , everything is white the actor wears Orange and the executer wears Black and the walls is white , my lighting kit is soo good , i need ideas about the kind of light and the ASA .

thanks for reading .

cheers

[Jim Keller]

Do you have the option to paint the walls? Gray can be made to photograph white without pushing the limits of your medium's dynamic range...

[Guest montaser abou saada]

first , thanks for reading and aswering jim .

yes is the answer and thats what am doing i asked them to to paint it with gray and ill do my best to make it bright , but the question now is how to deal with that gray , any tips ?

thx jim

[Jim Keller]

Bearing in mind that this is not my field of expertise, and would welcome input from those who actually do this sort of thing regularly, here's my thoughts:

 

First and foremost, if at all possible shoot a test or two with the film stock / video camera you're going to use. Any rule of thumb is at best a starting point.

 

As for the rule of thumb, if you can get the light off the wall to be a few stops higher than the light off the actors, it will go white on camera. Use a good incident light meter and set the camera for your actors' faces. (If you can costume the actor in black in a dark grey instead, it will also help). Then I would use a reflected light meter off the walls and make sure that they're reading two or so stops (depending on the results of the tests) higher than what I've just set my camera for. That should preserve details while still having it go white.

 

Another thing you can do is to literally paint the shadows, highlights, and details on the set, using various shades of grey, and then light it very flat but at the same level as your actors. Never done this myself, but seen it done very effectively by others...

[Guest montaser abou saada]

thanks Jim for this great informations , ill try to do that but we here in middle east don't use spot meter we use incident light meter , so as the DP's here , so i'll try to do it by incident meter ..

best regards ..

[Jim Keller]

thanks Jim for this great informations , ill try to do that but we here in middle east don't use spot meter we use incident light meter , so as the DP's here , so i'll try to do it by incident meter ..

best regards ..

 

If you've got a camera with a built-in light meter, you can get a decent approximation of reflected light by setting the shutter to 1/50 or 1/60 (a 180 degree shutter is the equivalent of 1/48 shutter speed) and metering either the wall or the whole scene and seeing where it suggest putting the f-stop...