James Lahaise

I don't have a recorded test of just the red, bit of an oversight in retrospective but it was just an instinctive thing I wanted to try and my thinking was that by adding a touch of yellow it would bring it more towards orange and away from magenta.

I did yeah, I was experimenting with the gels I had on hand to see how they looked and which combination produced the best colour!

I used a tungsten light with a deep red gel (may have doubled up) and also some yellow gel. Don’t have the exact names as these were off cuts and they weren’t labelled. I over exposed by a stop and then brought it down in the grade. I haven’t added any saturation but I do have a 35mm emulation LUT for the Alexa that I applied before bringing the levels down.

Thanks for your responses!

Thanks David! Would this be the same with various colours, exposing the neg/sensor to one colour on the skin would lose some detail on the skin? Or is red particularly sensitive to this on skin?

Hi there, I got my hands on an Alexa LF a few weeks back and did some gel tests at home with what I had available. This wasn't the most technically accurate way of testing but I had the camera and some bits lying around and thought I may swell try some stuff at home. I key'd my partner with a 650W tungsten head, with Deep Red & some yellow gel (not sure official name as these were off cuts I got from one of the first shoots I worked on and have no label) and put a couple layers of steel blue as a back light to test it out. I set the camera WB to 3200K and tested at exposing for middle grey, a stop over and a stop under to compare. I think the slightly over exposed version and then graded down came out the best, but I still find the skin tone to be a little flat or overly smooth? Is this to do with the wavelength of red light being reflected by the skin ? Any practical and technical advice would be appreciated! Also have to mention my partner was having an awful time WFH for her job and to make matters worse I was playing around lighting her with different gels with two tungsten heads on... So that's why she looks less than impressed in the photo haha Thanks!

I think it's kinda as you say, to overexpose on set. My interpretation of how they've explained the process is that when they processed the film they pushed it a stop, but on set he rated it lower so that he overexposed the neg by two stops. Seems like he's done a fairly bold exposure strategy to get the look, by counteracting the underexposure of pushing the negative on set with overexposure but still pushing in the development process.