LIGHTING

Lighting will be extremely important in this work. I want to highlight the features and expressions of the characters, to exaggerate emotion, yet use shadow to bring in a darker sentiment. The lighting workshop was very helpful as I have never really experimented with light before, so this gave me ideas which I tested with each of my models. I chose to use gels across the lamps, and flooded the studio with the colour of each specific sin. Using fast shutter speeds, low aperture, and a high ISO, I achieved what I wanted, and placed reflectors in the background which picked up the colour and outlined the form. When I start capturing the movement, I want to play more with depth of field, picking up a lot of detail but blurring the background.

Correlated Colour Temperature and Gel Nomenclature

Because I have never really experimented with controlling a light source and creating my own light, I have briefly researched into lighting to give me a better understanding of the subject. The image a camera sees or a screen shows will be very different to how it appears in real life. This is where light temperature, correction gels, white balance and filters come in. To simplify, the colour of a white light source depends on the correlated colour temperature, or CCT. The higher the CCT, the bluer the light will appear. A tungsten light of 3200K will appear less blue than sunlight at 5600K.

Two commonly used colour correction gels are CTB (colour temperature blue) and CTO (colour temperature orange). Using a CTB gel will change the light given from a 3200K tungsten light to a 'daylight' colour. A CTO gel will do the opposite. Obviously there is no specific daylight colour as daylight will vary depending on many different factors - time of day, pollution, location etc, so gels differ from manufacturer to manufacturer. Fluorescent lights generally appear very green, and gels can be used to to remove the greenness. These gels are called minus green. Plus green gels will obviously modify light into a green colour, which I plan to use when I begin to shoot 'envy'. Gels come in various strengths and are indicated by fractions eg. 3/4, 1/2 and so on.