Gels beyond CT applications

[Markus Stone]

Hi there;

 

I want to start playing more with gels for deliberate colour effects rather than just balancing everything to white.

 

What gels do people like to play with that are not for CT purposes? I've collected a few of those little swatch booklets - enough that I can stick together some swatches to cover a small Daylight LED so I can see the effect of actually projecting the light on a subject.

 

Just curious which ones other people tend to like, for whatever effects or purposes.

:-)

Markus

[Max Field]

I like splashing party gel light on background walls when I don't feel like going through the effort of hanging up a poster or placing furniture.

Edited October 25, 2017 by Macks Fiiod

[Brenton Lee]

Hey man

 

I'm in Melbourne also and have Rosco / Lee gel kits as well as some LED lighting if you ever want to meet up and have a lighting jam. I'm away till November though.

[Jaron Berman]

A good place to start may be with night. Nighttime is super colorful, but just because you can crank most cameras up to 8000iso on a fast prime doesn't mean you don't want to supplement/shape the light. Take some night photographs in different environments - maybe a downtown area, a parking ramp, a dive bar interior, alongside a road - try to find different environments that "feel" interesting to you. Take photos both in focus then completely out of focus both of the lit environment and of the sources - so the sources grow and look like color fields.

With your swatch book, see if you can match gels to the colors you see from these environments. With those gels, you can "extend" the light coming from things like neon signs, street lights, car head or taillights, etc... Having some feeling for the gels you can use to match your lights to environmental practicals is a nice start. Obviously you're not tied to "reality" - you can be as expressive as you want. Use party gels, why not? But starting from "real" sources is helpful.

[Markus Stone]

Thanks Jaron, that's really insightful.

 

I think I will do that.

 

Best

 

Markus

[David Mullen ASC]

CT gels are often used for artistic color effects, not just for color-correction to neutral.

 

Beyond them, the next most common gels (other than ND) correct along the green-magenta axis and also can be used creatively - blue can be turned into cyan, etc.

 

And then there are party gels, red being (for me) the most commonly used to create the effect of light from a neon sign or red emergency light. Other situations might call for specific colors for a nightclub scene, for example.

 

But for regular scenes outside of nightclubs, bars, etc. then the blue-orange and green-magenta gels can create most effects needed.

[Michael LaVoie]

I like Pale Gold to warm up an HMI for early morning daylight rather than CTO. Burnt Amber is a good gel for a direct sunset look on the background.