Hi everyone,
First post here! I have a question about getting dramatic lighting without noise in the shadows. Here's the hypothetical:
Say I'm going for a dramatic scene, lots of shadows. And let's also say the talent includes one person in the scene, sitting in a chair in a dark room. There are a couple of practicals in the scene so there's going to be more light than just a key and key/fill on the talent's face and body.
I'm using a 2.8 lens and I don't want to shoot wide open so I decide I'm going to key the actor at a 4.0. I set my lighting to do so, set my iris to 4.0 and viola - talent looks nice with an overhead softbox with a grid shining light down on them, and on their area only.
Meanwhile, other areas in the scene that aren't filled with practicals and their accompanying ambient light (which isn't much compared to my overhead softbox) goes into deep shadow. Well, there's the look I'm going for but now those areas are underexposed. And now there's going to be noise in the shot in those areas.
I can increase the light output of the overhead softbox and the practicals to get more light to the sensor. But to keep the talent at the right exposure I need to stop the camera down so all that additional light is basically going back to the same levels with some underexposure issues happening due to a larger f-stop.
Is my recourse going to be using more light for a clean shot and then darkening in post? As long as my ratio of key to practicals to shadows is where I want it, this should work? And if the scene is in a larger room than in my attached example (more space in between the light sources) would I add something like an ambient fill above the scene and then darken in post?
In the attached jpeg of a quick and dirty setup, I'm at a 3.2 f-stop with a 2 stop ND filter.
Thanks for any feedback on this!