Lighting morning exterior

[Thompson]

I'm pretty new to cinematography at all, especially to film. Allthough I'm just planning a 16mm stundent short film which includes an exterior morning scene in a garden. This seems to me to be more tricky than i first thought. My concerns especially turn around the colour temperature. What i want is a warm and bright morning light. Probably the sun would be nice in the frame. Probably not.

 

My strongest lights are 2,5kW HMIs.

 

What would you do to solve this task?

 

 

I'm happy about every suggestion.

 

Dylan

[Rolfe Klement]

if you shoot with daylight stock and your HMIs are stable and clean - you should be fine.

Make sure you don't get flicker from the HMIs - either run at safe fps or get a flicker free ballast - which might be more expensive

You might want to get a grad filter to bring more detail into the sky - if you have locked off shots

You might want to warm the image with either putting some gels on the lights or shooting through a warming filter on camera

Putting the sun in frame is tricky - try this experiment> go into the garden and look in the direction of the sun - block the sun from your eyes - and notice how because there is such a strong backlight the lighting ratio is quite high - you can get around it by using big mirrors on stands - or pumping huge amounts of light into the scene

Use diffusion if you want to to soften bright sunlight - it is more flattering to talent

 

I would avoid shooting into the sun unless you have to - try practice with still film to see the issue

 

thanks

 

Rolfe

[Sam Wells]

Gee if I were shooting a morning ext in a garden I'd try morning sunlight in a garden.

 

Call me weird....

 

Sun plus a couple reflectors and you likely got it. Now if the sun doesn't cooperate, you may have to fake a bit with one of your HMI's.

 

I would in any case warm the HMI's - CTS is a good choice. I hate the obvious 1/4 CTO look, personally.

 

You can warm the reflected sunlight used as fill, but in my experience it's easy to overdo this (eg gold flexfill etc) it's tempting, but can get too obvious.

 

I love strong natural backlight.

 

-Sam