photographing people with glasses

[Stuart Allman]

I ran into a problem during a documentary shoot last night with out main subject. She's a 90 year old woman who wears large (bug eye) glasses with built in bifocals. The key and fill lights were all over those glasses and there wasn't much we could do to debug the problem on set given the time constraint. We couldn't exactly ask a 90 year old woman to take off the glasses and do the interview completely blind and squinting. Even when the subject tilted her head down the bifocals would catch the lights.

 

I'd like to hear peoples' advice on how they handle interview subjects who wear glasses.

 

I already know about providing frames without glass and watching incident angles, but are there other techniques I could have used to quickly adapt? I tried having the subject angle her body more toward the camera, but that didn't work because she was still looking at the interviewer (duh!).

 

Thanks in advance.

[David Mullen ASC]

I just shot something with a number of actors wearing period eyeglasses, so no anti-reflection coatings allowed, unfortunately it meant lighting them from fairly extreme angles above or to one side. Since it was in an office place, I justified seeing a horizontal line of a Kinoflow in the very top edge glasses as looking like a horizontal ceiling lamp. You may be able to get away with the round shape of a paper lantern at the top part of the glasses just breaking into the reflection as if it were a household fixture.

 

As for fill, I've found that you may have to use a small hard fill so that the reflection is just a white dot in the glasses. At least that can be less distracting than a large reflection.