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James Wong Howe Lighting Demo


Uli Meyer

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I saw this in film school and even then, I felt that James Wong Howe should have stopped at some point when it started to go from simple, clean, and motivated to looking overlit, but I think he was giving the students some insight as to why you sometimes add additional spots on things lest they fall-off. Plus I think this was shot on slow Ektachrome 16mm film so he had to work with some pretty harsh lights and deal with a more contrasty piece of film.

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1 hour ago, David Mullen ASC said:

I saw this in film school and even then, I felt that James Wong Howe should have stopped at some point when it started to go from simple, clean, and motivated to looking overlit, but I think he was giving the students some insight as to why you sometimes add additional spots on things lest they fall-off.

Can’t have the students thinking that set lighting is too easy! ?

Wasn’t there an ASC cinematographer who once said after he was done lighting, he liked to turn off his lights one by one until it looked good? 

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On 9/21/2020 at 8:01 PM, Mark Dunn said:

Wonderful to see in its day - I think nowadays we might consider calling that "overlit". Very John Ford.

I hope David Mullen doesn't see that (also kidding!)

Nowadays I think the DP would look at the production design department and request more practical lighting. 

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Is it that modern stocks read far more in the shadows than their older counterparts? It could be a matter of lighting style, and because I'm not a DP I don't know, but can fill ratios be much lower than in the past?

I have an old 1981 roll of 7247 rushes from film school and as far as I remember I lit to the recommended ratio, but the shadows are much deeper than you'd expect to see nowadays. We only used about 3 lights (pace James Wong Howe) but I don't think it's all down to that.

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If you look at a lot of color night work on location in the 1950's and 1960's, you often see a lot more blackness and shadow (because the ASA for 35mm color negative was 25 ASA until 1959, then 50 ASA, 100 ASA with a push) than today's location night work which can be fairly low-contrast at times. 

Yes, the stocks and more importantly, the prints (or the transfer to TV process... or the fact that movies were shown in drive-ins) all contributed to the idea that some fill light was needed for natural shadow reproduction, it's just that to modern eyes, it looks overdone, especially now that we can transfer off of the original negative or an intermediate element.  But often you see excessive fill or key lighting on day exteriors in old movies, partly to make sure the face popped out of the background but also to deal with the harsher prints that theaters got, or because it was a TV show being transferred at some TV station using a film chain running a print.

But I can't say that starting in 1968 with 5254 that modern stocks are much lower in contrast than the old ones, maybe just a little. But today we can pull a lot more detail off of film negatives than we could in the past.

Some of the loss of shadow detail in older movies is also due to rating the stocks faster out of necessity and then adding fill to compensate.  You constantly read about 1960s movies being shot under 150 fc light levels, whereas technically a 50 ASA stock needs 200 fc to shoot at f/2.8, and some of those movies were using f/4 zooms.

But if this demo was shot on 16mm 25 ASA ECO reversal, then Howe would have been working with more light and less exposure flexibility than he was used to by then working with 50 ASA color negative through the 60s.

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14 hours ago, Mark Dunn said:

Is it that modern stocks read far more in the shadows than their older counterparts? It could be a matter of lighting style, and because I'm not a DP I don't know, but can fill ratios be much lower than in the past?

As ASA/ISO sensitivity increases, the more natural environmental ambience comes into play. If the daylight ambience of a location interior is 12fc and you’re exposing your key at 25fc (f/2.8 @ 400 ASA), then you’ll have a 2:1 contrast ratio without adding any fill. The subject and the room will be pretty flat without doing much work. To get more contrast at higher ASA/ISOs, you need to either use NDs to knock down the natural ambience, or take away light. 

On the other hand, if you’re exposing your key at 200fc in the same scenario (f/4 @ 100 ASA) as a lot of older films had to do, then your ratio will be 16:1, or 4 stops between key and shadow. In order to get the same 2:1 ratio at 100 ASA, you need 100fc of fill light. And that’s just for the subject, the room will also need that same amount of fill overall to get a similar looking image. 

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