Statue lighting

[Dustan Lewis McBain]

Im shooting a short b-roll clip of statues. My goal is to portray these statues as revolutionary bandits - so to speak. Attached to this post is the picture of the statue. Shooting at night, partly because i don't think i would get away with this during the day. However, my question is lighting. Shooting on a t2i (550 d) 16-35 mm ef 2 usm, does any one have any ideas apart from shooting with just night light? Cheers, /Users/pimpgoofy/Desktop/10070861.jpg/Users/pimpgoofy/Desktop/10070861.jpg

[Ari Schaeffer]

Im shooting a short b-roll clip of statues. My goal is to portray these statues as revolutionary bandits - so to speak. Attached to this post is the picture of the statue. Shooting at night, partly because i don't think i would get away with this during the day. However, my question is lighting. Shooting on a t2i (550 d) 16-35 mm ef 2 usm, does any one have any ideas apart from shooting with just night light? Cheers, /Users/pimpgoofy/Desktop/10070861.jpg/Users/pimpgoofy/Desktop/10070861.jpg

 

 

You didn't actually attach anything, sooo, hard to go off, but I'd say just light them like people. Use considerations for whatever material and color the statues are obviously. Lighter toned material will glow/bounce, while darker material will suck up light, but still give you specular highlights (ala car lighting).

 

Just remember side lighting will give you more texture of the object. If they are to scale to people I don't see why you couldn't light them as such (key frontal, over head, or sidey..some fill to lessen contrast, maybe some highlights/edges/rims/kickers for depth...

 

I don't really think there's one magic approach to this, not to mention a ton of variables (size of subjects, fov, size of the space you see, what else you see in frame, etc etc etc etc). If you need something dramatic as hell, try and think of the mood your conveying with the statues and then go from there...if I wanted to creep people out big time, I might use some underlighting to key it, or maybe snoot my key so It's only showing me a sinister looking portion of the face...that's where the creativity lies and you should have fun with it!