Week 4 - First Time Doing Light Setups

Exploring Different Contrast Ratios, Light Meters, Setting Up the Sony, Doing our 1st Lighting Setup

This week we did some group work. The class was divided into 3 and we tried out different lighting setups to try and play with contrast ratio. We learned how to use the electronic light meters and saw the different kinds of light meters (Incident light meter and reflective light meter)

We setup the Sony Camera for the 1st Time. Our image was quite dark even though we had a lot of light. We later saw that it was because there was an ND filter preset on the Sony that was cutting the light down.

Our team did a basic 3 point lighting setup - we had to move the positionning of our light because our fill was washing out the contrast of our key light. We were able to influence the contrast ratio based on where we positioned our fill light. The more it was focused on the subject the smaller the resulting contrast ratio came out. The smaller the contrast ratio, the flatter the image and color tones were.

We rigged the background board with 2 C-Stands (1 on each side of the board) and added sandbags on both the front and back of the background board to keep it steady.

We setup a small pepper light as a backlight.

Our Fill Light was a 650K Arri with a white diffusion filter clipped on it.

Our Key was a 650K Arri with a cookie in front of it to cut and disperse the light.

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Comments and Takeaways

I really enjoyed doing some hands on stuff for a longer period of time during the class. It felt really good and fun. We tried out a few different things on our 3 point lighting setup and explored how to setup the lights and C-Stands along with a background board. It was fun and our team collaborated well together. It was a very enjoyable class.