Hello all,
I had a question regarding bouncing light. Specifically in low budget scenarios with no desk ops/DMX setups and often without a proper gaffer… Let’s say I’m making a big soft key light by bouncing multiple small sources into an 8x8 frame in a fairly cramped space (could be tungsten fresnels on dimmers or LED fixtures with their own dimmers) - I always find that it takes a while to get the balance of the different levels of the lights into the frame to get the desired look on the scene that I want. Partly cause I’m often running back and forth between the lights and the camera. Also just in terms of trying to fill the frame as much as possible with the right levels coming from the different lights, I find this takes a fair bit of tweaking to get just right and is never as simple as ‘just bounce 3 lights into that frame’.
I’ve even had this situation with gaffers, where they get it all set up but it doesn’t look right until I’ve tweaked it to within an inch of its life. I always get what I’m after eventually so maybe this is a moot point but my question is whether there is a specific standardised system for setting something like this up? E.g. setting one fixture at a time and gradually increasing the size of the source. Again, I imagine in the world of desk ops and DMX this is all a lot simpler but just wanted to check if any DOPs or gaffers had any nuggets of wisdom for this sort of thing as I see myself still having to do this sort of setup a fair bit in the future.
P.s. I found this a lot easier when I was starting out by using something like a 2k blonde to create a single large bounce source so maybe the answer lies in using single sources for bouncing but I’ve not found many decent open face equivalents in the LED world.