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Bouncing or Shooting through unbleached muslin:


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I read a lot of ASC magazine and bouncing of unbleached muslin is mentioned a lot.   My question is if your lighting with LEDS and want the softness of bouncing off Muzz can you just light it through the material rather then bouncing off?  My understanding is when you bounce off muslin its because your working with strong units like HMIS correct?  Apologies if this has been discussed before

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Usually, Muslin is used as a bounce material. Roger Deakins uses it a lot, sometimes with HMI lamps (usually bleached muslin), sometimes with tungsten (unbleached Muslin). It's a lovely soft light, without any specular quality, like you sometime get from harder bounces like griffolyn.

You can also light through it, but it takes a lot of light to do it. Robert Richardson did this on Snow Falling On Cedars, but he was using maxi-brutes and dinos to do it. It's a very inefficient use of light. I doubt there are many LED units on the market that have enough punch  to push through muslin.

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@Phil Rhodes: That looks cool. Which brand is it?

@omar robles: Generally, the thicker a diffusion is, the more it bounces rather than transmits in my experience. Like what Stuart said, it's not impossible to shoot through something as thick as muslin, but it requires a lot more punch because the thickness of the material itself is either absorbing or bouncing the light.

You can even use foam core as diffusion if you want! I experimented with it in college by shooting a Maxi-brute through a 4x4 piece of foam core (the kind used for school presentations):
great-unexpecations001.thumb.jpg.41f43d63a1fe4723d8a88b98b3f1ecb4.jpg

The thicker the diffusion you use, the more it warms the light. I had to put a cocktail of CTB and Minus Green gels to get it back to tungsten. Thankfully the school had a color meter I could use!

Would I do it outside of an experiment? Most likely not. I'll just bounce off the foam core with a lower wattage light. ?

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The only thing i hate about bouncing unbleached muslin is the spillage. Be prepared to have a lot of flags.

On 5/24/2020 at 5:35 AM, Stuart Brereton said:

Usually, Muslin is used as a bounce material. Roger Deakins uses it a lot, sometimes with HMI lamps (usually bleached muslin), sometimes with tungsten (unbleached Muslin). It's a lovely soft light, without any specular quality, like you sometime get from harder bounces like griffolyn.

You can also light through it, but it takes a lot of light to do it. Robert Richardson did this on Snow Falling On Cedars, but he was using maxi-brutes and dinos to do it. It's a very inefficient use of light. I doubt there are many LED units on the market that have enough punch  to push through muslin.

Tung

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