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Questions for other DPs (About lighting)


Stephen Sanchez

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I should have mentioned, the shot is cutting with wide of a woman looking out of a high rise office building at the sunrise, fairly contrasty look exposed for the windows. Warm light from the sun on the horizon.

The wide is from behind the woman looking out the window. Cut to eyeball shot with the sunrise reflection in the pupil. Cut to profile CU as she turns from window and walks away.

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I had so much trouble getting enough exposure even with a Skypanel S60 a few feet from actor’s face, it was nuts. I think I ended up shooting at 48fps and T5.6 just to get enough exposure. I guess being at the extreme close end of the macro lens didn’t help. I also had to snoot the lens way down to cut down on flares so I’m sure I lost exposure from that.

6663E411-6CA3-419E-AE75-50BCA6D2790B.thumb.jpeg.c75f97af2a71d0817a4c044f7f2a75ef.jpeg2nd AC Robbie Julian with the snooted 100mm Master Macro. 

The framing proved to be a bigger challenge than the lighting though. I tried all kinds of long telephoto zooms and primes in prep testing to get further away, but couldn’t get a sharp enough image with anything but the Master Macro. Even with a Canon 30-300 / 2x doubler / diopter, the front of the lens was less than 1’ away from the subject! 

7975DFEC-EB7E-4785-AE4F-2D99FF90EAD9.thumb.jpeg.8ae3bde81efeec12e0cafd7d9b260f51.jpegVideofax lens technician Anton Lovett is patiently sitting in for me here at my test shoot.

I think what I really needed was a Zeiss 70-200 Compact Zoom and a Lindsey Optics Macro attachment but nobody carries the latter in SF, and the CZ wasn’t available.

I also should have put the actor on a pancake to raise her up a bit, but she was so boxed in with rigging already that it would have been a big deal to do.

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I just did a little messing around at home. I used my Mamiya 645 110mm lens (cf. 3' 10") with #2 & #3 Mamiya extension tubes. That brought the close focus down to about 11". I lit it with a Quasar 6" tube from about 4 inches away to the side. Stop on the lens was f8, but the meter was reading f22, so I guess the extension tubes were costing me 3 stops. 1/125th sec, 800 ISO.

 

DSCF8233 copy.jpg

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5 minutes ago, David Mullen ASC said:

https://cinequipt.com/products/arri-macro-200mm-t4-3-1-1-magnification/

I think I used this lens for all the eyeball shots in "The Love Witch" -- 200mm was a bit more comfortable than a 100mm in terms of the distance.

Yes, that's the problem with using regular lenses with diopters or extension tubes - you can choose a longer lens, but they generally don't focus so close in the first place, so your net gain in magnification is very little.

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53 minutes ago, Stuart Brereton said:

I just did a little messing around at home. I used my Mamiya 645 110mm lens (cf. 3' 10") with #2 & #3 Mamiya extension tubes. That brought the close focus down to about 11". I lit it with a Quasar 6" tube from about 4 inches away to the side. Stop on the lens was f8, but the meter was reading f22, so I guess the extension tubes were costing me 3 stops. 1/125th sec, 800 ISO.

 

DSCF8233 copy.jpg

Nice, looks great!

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27 minutes ago, David Mullen ASC said:

https://cinequipt.com/products/arri-macro-200mm-t4-3-1-1-magnification/

I think I used this lens for all the eyeball shots in "The Love Witch" -- 200mm was a bit more comfortable than a 100mm in terms of the distance.

Ah yes, I remember that lens. There used to be a rental house up here (Lee Utterbach) that had a set of ARRI Macros (60, 100, 200mm), but it’s long gone now. That would have been useful to have!

I shot a lens test with it on the Red One a long time ago for a DP who was trying to shoot macro shots of a live housefly crawling over an actor’s hands. That was near impossible to pull focus on!

ARRI Macro 200mm / T4.3 / f=2’

200mm Macro T4.3 @ 2'

 

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Here was the result of the test above with the Canon 30-300mm / Century 2x doubler / +2 Diopter:

126715530_Eye_600mmDiopter2.thumb.jpg.4ef77161e96301697e056cd2ffd66075.jpg

Pretty bad optically, even stopped down to T8/11. I think regular single element diopters are not great for this much magnification. Achromats would be better if they were available locally.

100mm Master Macro on its own, not as tight obviously, but would still be cleaner after cropping.

Eye_MasterMacro100.thumb.jpg.14c453f096381bc2cc8ebad94228e188.jpg

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19 minutes ago, David Mullen ASC said:

Perhaps if you wrapped a giant diffusion around the actor but then only hit it from behind from an edge kicker angle you'd get the highlight shine on the eyeball but not see the edge of a diffusion frame in the reflection?

That's a great idea!

I think what we ended up doing was building a wall of solids around the camera side and back of the talent, and then having a 6x or 8x grid on a t-bone with the S60 behind it. I was worried about getting a large white reflection in the eye that would obscure the iris. We had to move it around a whole bunch to get the light into the iris while minimizing the reflection.

As you say, it probably should have been a large sheet of bleached muslin coved around the actor, and I could have used multiple sources behind the mus to get the light where I needed it.

Another issue I ran into was that the test shot in prep looked better than the real shot (even though I only had a 1k fresnel and just bounced it off the prep bay dry erase board) because my stand-in had a light colored green-hazel iris, which was much easier to light than the actor's dark brown iris.

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Satsuki, did you consider setting this up outside?

Skylight will incident meter at f30 for me on a normal day. Use that for the back soft light, build a tend around the camera side with floppies (or dense diffusion rag), and set an HMI for the rim. The hard light will show the texture of the iris, which I liked from the first image you posted. That would be my go-to for the required stoppage.

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1 hour ago, Stephen Sanchez said:

Satsuki, did you consider setting this up outside?

Skylight will incident meter at f30 for me on a normal day. Use that for the back soft light, build a tend around the camera side with floppies (or dense diffusion rag), and set an HMI for the rim. The hard light will show the texture of the iris, which I liked from the first image you posted. That would be my go-to for the required stoppage.

Wasn’t really an option for us. We had a pretty tight 2 day shooting schedule, 90% interiors in a huge office tower, mostly on Steadicam so often lit for 180-270 degrees. It was hard to enough to find all of our interior locations on one floor, so adding a company move with all of the security restrictions was not gonna happen on our schedule. Our few exterior locations were shot at the end of Day 2 in an adjoining elevated park where our permit was for only 90 minutes or so. We shot the exteriors with only 1 grip, a beadboard, and a floppy so G&E could get a head start on wrapping out of the tower.

As it was, I begged to reshoot the eyeball shot on Day 2 before the macro lens had to go back to the rental house, as the first attempt wasn’t good at all. I was lucky to get that much! Lastly, we had pre-dawn calls on both days to get two chances at the sunrise and had clouds both mornings. We ended up doing the wide shot as sky replacement (always our backup plan) and recreated the ‘sunlight’ with a tweenie on a menace arm placed above the window. So I don’t know how much extra light we would have gained by shooting outside.

For our wide shot, I actually tested the ‘lightbulb window reflection as fake sunrise’ gag from the film ‘Tess’ that David Mullen posted about a long time ago, but since the windows were double pane, dirty, and curved to boot, it didn’t work at all. 

For the eyeball shot, I did have a Skypanel 360 available that I could have used, but the gaffer thought it would be too big and unwieldy if we had to constantly adjust the light’s position. I did consider putting the actor right up against the 360, which I maybe should have tried.

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11 hours ago, Satsuki Murashige said:

 I think regular single element diopters are not great for this much magnification. Achromats would be better if they were available.

Extension tubes are a better choice, optically, as long as you can deal with loss of exposure.

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When I shot the coffee thing with the Sirui anamorphics recently, I had a set of extension tubes, but extension tubes don't work on (at least some types of) anamorphic. I ended up using dioptres. I'm not sure if anamorphic plus extensions is a very common combination outside of DSLR situations, but it's worth bearing in mind, I guess.

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11 hours ago, Satsuki Murashige said:

For the eyeball shot, I did have a Skypanel 360 available that I could have used, but the gaffer thought it would be too big and unwieldy if we had to constantly adjust the light’s position. I did consider putting the actor right up against the 360, which I maybe should have tried.

That sounds like a great idea. In my experience super tight shots always take longer than budgeted.

That brings up some great talking points. 1) budgeting time to light shots, 2) having to complete a task in unideal situations.
I'll add that to the list.

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11 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

When I shot the coffee thing with the Sirui anamorphics recently, I had a set of extension tubes, but extension tubes don't work on (at least some types of) anamorphic. I ended up using dioptres. I'm not sure if anamorphic plus extensions is a very common combination outside of DSLR situations, but it's worth bearing in mind, I guess.

I’ve read that lenses which use variable diopters in their design (as some anamorphics do) can’t be used with extension tubes or anything that alters the back focus of the lens.

Not sure if that’s true and I haven’t tested it for myself, but it does make sense to me and your experience seems to be a data point in favor. 

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23 hours ago, David Mullen ASC said:

Yes, maybe it would be better to use a 6K Red Super 35 camera and the 100mm Macro and then crop.

Yup, this is one of the few times when I would take a Red over an Alexa Mini. A Helium would have been perfect! Unfortunately the Alexa was a client-owner camera, so I would have had to lose some lighting to make up the budget difference of renting another body. As it was, I was trying to get the gaffer more of the budget as he was getting squeezed a bit by production. Sigh.

E11DF521-B3AC-47AE-B2A8-010FBEBC8381.gif.fc1ee04934350d702c673d235ed8e712.gif

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The trick with that room going from day to night is creating the arcing sweep of the sun as it lowers and gets warmer.  I've done with with a 10K on a dimmer hung from a jib arm but it isn't easy.  Next issue is that as the sun lowers and warms up and gets dimmer is that the ambient daylight gets bluer -- today you could use LEDs for that. Before I had to cross fade bounce lights with a different amount of blue gel on them. The night portion is easier unless you want the Moon to rise as well, but then, that would have to be through an opposite window from the setting sun...

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1 hour ago, David Mullen ASC said:

The trick with that room going from day to night is creating the arcing sweep of the sun as it lowers and gets warmer.  I've done with with a 10K on a dimmer hung from a jib arm but it isn't easy.  Next issue is that as the sun lowers and warms up and gets dimmer is that the ambient daylight gets bluer -- today you could use LEDs for that. Before I had to cross fade bounce lights with a different amount of blue gel on them. The night portion is easier unless you want the Moon to rise as well, but then, that would have to be through an opposite window from the setting sun...

Didn’t you have a shot like this for ‘Mrs. Maisel’? I seem to remember a circular dolly shot as the parents move out of the apartment transitioning from day to night, but maybe I’m mis-remembering.

It would be interesting to also build in a lens iris rack so the depth of field gets shallower as it gets darker. Not sure if that would be distracting or not. I guess it’s a question of whether you want to just capture the feeling of transition from the character’s perspective, or whether you want a photographically realistic effect from the audience’s perspective. Artistic interpretation vs technical recreation...

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That was a morph during a 360 degree Steadicam move from night to day, so two plates.

I'm not sure a depth of field shift would be that important for an interior space because we've seen day interiors shot at T/2.8 before. However for practical reasons, opening up the iris might be necessary.  I've done it for scene where the room goes from light on to lights out with moonlight to see what's going on -- rather than "dim up" the moonlight during a cross-fade as the room lights go out, I sometimes have the moonlight always on but much dimmer than the room lights (which is realistic) and then when the lights go out, I open up the iris to simulate your eyes adjusting to the moonlight.

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