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Hard Light, Women, And Brian DePalma


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On 8/11/2020 at 3:00 PM, Marcos Cooper said:

How do you make women look beautiful with hard light in the Steve Burum/John Alonzo/Brian DePalma style? Watching movies like Scarface, the shadows are incredibly hard when they appear but the women look like goddesses. What technique is being used. 

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On the Alec Baldwin podcast Brian DePalma was complaining that no one lights women properly and then he said this: 

"What I think is terrible now with all these streaming movies where they all shoot digitally where it's all with this bounced light and everybody looks like, excuse the expression, (a word that rhymes with quit), it's very dispiriting."

So I'm tossing all my silks and muslin and scrimmery but what do I do now? 

 

Brian's comments here, and without knowing the extent of the context, are narrow-minded and opinionated.

@Marcos Cooper, don't toss your way of lighting because of what a director said. He's no DP. Your job is to be able to diagnose what soft/hardness, wrap, and contrast is needed to get the look you want. 

Case in point. Under Michelle Pfeiffer's lighting setup, if she was replaced with Iggy Pop (pictured below), Brian's affinity for the shot will not be so favorable anymore. Like Satsuki said, people with smooth faces and shallow pores will appear to accept hard lighting easy. Seemingly magically. But it's because their faces have no texture to cast micro shadows. This is the same with children because their faces have yet to form blemishes, acne, or wrinkles.

There is no magic here, its just a smooth face. Light the way you like. But also, don't stop experimenting.

iggy2.JPG

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6 minutes ago, Stephen Sanchez said:

Brian's comments here, and without knowing the extent of the context, are narrow-minded and opinionated.

They're not. It's British irony. Which, if I may generalise as you have, Americans don't get.

Brian has been in the business for decades. He knows more than most here could ever dream of.

Edited by Mark Dunn
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David Watkin covers this in his autobiography when talking about whether diffusion filters are needed to get rid of wrinkles in a face -- he said direction of lighting is the number one issue, not filtering -- a wrinkle is only seen because the light is creating a shadow of it along one side, so the more frontal the light, the less texture the skin will have because of the lack of shadows.

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1 hour ago, David Mullen ASC said:

David Watkin covers this in his autobiography when talking about whether diffusion filters are needed to get rid of wrinkles in a face -- he said direction of lighting is the number one issue, not filtering -- a wrinkle is only seen because the light is creating a shadow of it along one side, so the more frontal the light, the less texture the skin will have because of the lack of shadows.

excellent point. Which is also why soft light is effective ...you can keep the light directional and have contrast on the face while having soft shadow. That is if you're concerned with skin texture. 

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Up to a point, skin can still look very textured if the soft light is coming from the side, so wrinkles and bags will still be highlighted, just not as crisply.  Watkin's point was that a diffusion filter just makes the shadow lines fuzzier (same with softer lighting) but the only way to get rid of them is with frontal lighting so that they don't cast shadows.  So sometimes there is no magic bullet, flat lighting is the only way to reduce information like skin texture on a face.

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3 hours ago, David Mullen ASC said:

David Watkin covers this in his autobiography when talking about whether diffusion filters are needed to get rid of wrinkles in a face -- he said direction of lighting is the number one issue, not filtering -- a wrinkle is only seen because the light is creating a shadow of it along one side, so the more frontal the light, the less texture the skin will have because of the lack of shadows.

Definitely agree, that’s a great lesson.

I do think that optical micro-contrast is still a significant factor in beautifying faces though. Maybe not for deep wrinkles, but certainly for pores and small blemishes. Most older lenses just don’t resolve high contrast line pairs that well at wide apertures, which translates to skin looking smoother. And practically every classic movie lit with hard light was shot with what we would now call soft lenses, often with extra diffusion on top for the women. I think a combination approach works best if beauty photography is the objective. 

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On 8/12/2020 at 7:15 PM, David Mullen ASC said:

Wait, hard frontal high-key glamour lighting on every woman's close-up isn't a realistic way to light movies? I had no idea!

Thankfully, Albion (or whatever his real name is) was here to point that out...

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18 minutes ago, Albion Hockney said:

It also wasn't the only point. There was a whole paragraph of text before that ya know  ?

 

There's also a whole paragraph on the sign up page that mentions this being a real names forum.

 

On 8/15/2020 at 6:49 PM, David Mullen ASC said:

David Watkin covers this in his autobiography when talking about whether diffusion filters are needed to get rid of wrinkles in a face -- he said direction of lighting is the number one issue, not filtering

Very much agree. Bringing a soft source more frontal will help a lot more than lens diffusion. It's not always appropriate, but I'd much rather do that than soften the image too much

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