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Christopher Santucci

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Posts posted by Christopher Santucci

  1. I have a low mileage, babied Canon C300 MKIII (EF mount) that's fully set up with Zacuto gear. I have all the original stuff that came with it plus the following (and what's mentioned in the title):

    4 - BP-A60 battery (1 Canon, 3 Kastar)

    AC power supply

    3 - SanDisk Extreme Pro 128GB CF express card

    Sony QR plate

    Sony USB 3.1 CFExpress/XQD Memory Card Reader

    Everything was purchased new with the camera. I shot a half dozen broadcast spots with it, but I'm no longer in the freelance world. The camera has never been touched by anyone besides myself, and I'd like to get $12,000. for it. I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah: santucci.chris@gmail.com

    https://postimg.cc/gallery/2805Zw7

  2. On 5/10/2021 at 10:42 AM, Karl Eklund said:

    If contrast and fall off are the same in your mind might just be because they are usually interchangeable, however I think the better way to "see it in your mind is":

    Contrast = The difference between A and B.

    Fall off = "The rate of the contrast difference", i.e. is it going from full strength to half in 1 feet or 5 feet, 20 feet, etc... 

    In practical terms it means that the sun has 0 fall off, but lots of contrast (which is also why it is such a hard task to emulate it properly with artificial lights). Basically you have to decide with lights if you gonna control the "contrast" or the "fall off", it is hard to get both right if the scene/objects being lit are very big/complex. 

    The example you give is a good one, but it is also basically saying that contrast and fall off are two separate things which they are (which is why it isn't good to "combine" the two terms). 

    OK, so they're merely related.

  3. The level from your side lights is too high. You're going for reflections on something that's shiny and that doesn't take much level. Think of it almost like an eye light which is just enough light to put a reflection on reflective eyeballs. And, avoid point source. If you have the same kind of hair as shown in that video, you have large reflective surfaces, so you need a large enough radiating face to reflect against those large hair surfaces.

  4. 1 hour ago, David Mullen ASC said:

    I still think you are mixing up fall-off rate with contrast. If you light a field at night from the side with an 18K HMI a block away and then light the close-up with a 12x12 soft light ten feet away, no viewer is going to say “hey, why did the contrast increase?” Same thing when you silk the overhead sun that is far away, creating a soft light only 20 feet above the actor’s head, you don’t see a huge increase in contrast (I can’t imagine telling a director that I won’t silk hard overhead sunlight because that’s only going to make the contrast problems worse.) What you do get is a more rapid fall-off rate. But the shadow side opposite the key doesn’t change much, which is what contrast generally refers to.

    Contrast and fall off are the same thing to my mind. Key someone standing 10 feet in front of another person with a fixture that's 3 feet away. Compare that to the fixture at 20 feet away. What happens is greater fall off at 3 feet away, than 20 feet away. The unlit person further back will be darker with the fixture at 3 feet away from the subject (more contrast - more fall off), and both will be more evenly lit with the fixture 20 feet away (less contrast - less fall off).

    You're talking about using modifiers and different setups. I'm just talking about the nature of light on an elemental level. It's really just inverse square law at play.

    • Like 1
  5. I'm really just talking about the nature of light under any circumstance. Bringing a fixture closer (to anything) will mean greater fall off because you're going to expose for whatever, but moving that same fixture back means all that light falling on whatever is going to be more even, hence less contrast and less fall off. It's like spraying water from a hose at a wall. If you're close, part of the wall will get wetter than another part (contrast), but if you back up, more of the wall will get evenly wet.

  6. I had to draw pictures. What I'm saying is distance creates less contrast because (as per inverse square law), all light falling on a surface from the farther light is doing so at a lower ratio difference. The two arrows depicting light emitting from the closer light have a much higher ratio than the farther light, and hence would create more contrast.

    This is why we bring lights far enough away from a flat copy shot, because that light is more even that way.

    close.jpg

    far.jpg

    • Like 1
  7. 10 hours ago, David Mullen ASC said:

    I don’t think distance of source and contrast are related. An overcast sky is a distant source creating a lower-contrast effect and the sun falling through gaps in a forest canopy is a distant source creating a higher-contrast effect.

    OK, let's use the same smallish fixture and place it 1' from a face, and then back it out 10' from that same face. At 10' the fall off will be almost non-existent (ENG light, I call it) on that face, at 1' there will be significant fall off.

    Placing a lit 20x silk 100 yards away will throw light no unlike a single hard source with no fall off, but placing that same 20x 10' away will produce a light with more contrast, hence greater fall off.

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  8. Sorry, tldr, but "fall off" is pretty simple and can be explained with a lot less words.

    The closer a source is to something, the greater the contrast, and hence - a more sudden fall off.

    At the extreme end, the sun, which is millions of miles away and produces a completely even light with essentially no fall off.

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  9. I wouldn't use it for everything, but I've worked in a fair amount of office settings where it works great using the existing ceiling fixtures and low bounce. It's certainly easy to set up in rooms and just bounce off a white ceiling, but it's not as cool looking as window light in my opinion. I generally will bounce off a white ceiling when I need an ambient base in a room, but I don't key that way anymore.

  10. I never got a sense that lighting was ever used to elevate a character arc in any film. Not saying lighting hasn't been used this way, but I never noticed it. You should identify films that even have strong character arcs and then scrub through to see if lighting approach changes for protagonists by the end.

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