How to fill for daylight

[XCheck]

I am going to shoot in a hall and an office with large windows - i.e., a lot of natural light. I want to use some tungsten fill, but I found that if I just use full CTB in front of my Lowell Omni, I get fairly harsh shadows from that.

I want to soften it, so I tried to use a diffusion screen -too much light is lost. So I am thinking about using a silver umbrella as a bounce. I haven't tried it yet, but I think if I put a full CTB between the light and the umbrella, it will again be too weak, and too blue (light has to go through the gel twice). My gel is the sheet variety, too small to spread wide in front of the whole light setup.

Should I use a 1/2 CTB between the light and the umbrella, essentially making it one?

Any other suggestions?

Jerry

[PrestonH]

Gel the light(s) and fire it at the umbrella (or bounce off a white card or foamcore). Depending on the ambient light levels and your intended shot, you might be able to get away with only bounced light from a card or foamcore just off camera - without worrying about color temp issues.

[Barry_Green]

Hmmm... what about blasting it at a blue piece of posterboard? I have no idea if that would work, but maybe it'd do the bounce and the (inaccurate) color-correction all-in-one?

[taubkin]

If you manage to get a large piece of foamcore close enough you can fill reflecting the very sunlight from the windows...

A Full CTB on a Backlight and you'r set...

[araujofh]

Hmmm... what about blasting it at a blue piece of posterboard? I have no idea if that would work, but maybe it'd do the bounce and the (inaccurate) color-correction all-in-one?

This would be a nice experiment.

All the best

Fidel.

[THiNSPiRiT]

I would recommend just using a white reflector to bounce the natural sunlight coming from the windows... it's usually better than trying to add additional lights simply because it will match the intensity of the light coming in as well as maintain the same colour balance as the natural light... if the white isn't enough, try using a silver... this can sometimes be too obvious and not soft enough though...

If the outside light is too bright for anything in general, I would gel the windows using some light ND gels... this is specifically if you're going for something with a shallow depth of field... a nice ND filter on the camera would also give a similar effect but the interiour lighting in the background if not exposed to the same natural light would end up being underexposed (not sure if this even matters depending on the composition of your shot)

The cheapest and easiest way bottom line would be to use a reflector reflecting the sun's natural rays...

[Jonathan_Healey]

Here's an Apple QuickTime example of a similiar shot that I videotaped, last week.

http://www.aviewofyou.tv/wetlands/shapiro.html

The director insisted on the composition, so I was forced to make it happen. The lighting for this was extremely tricky, but I got it to work. Here's how I did it: When I first arrived the sun was much to bright to shoot the subject in front of the window. Knowing the day's forecast (rain) we waited for some cloud coverage. While we waited, I positioned a 650-watt ARRI as my key and a 300-watt ARRI for fill. I attached 1-and-a-half stops of diffusion with a 1-blue gel on top of that onto each ARRI's barndoors. Next, I white balanced.

I think you'll notice that Shapiro's skin tone is a bit orangy, but FCP4 color correction can fix that. I also think I'm going to mask the sky in the background and, perhaps, use a 3rd-party AE cloud generator to re-create a sunny, partly cloudy day.I'm also going to remove the window frame on the left side of the frame.

[JBN]

On my monitor, the guy is basically a sillouette. I'm not seeing any fill light at all. ???

[XCheck]

Thanks guys for all the replies. I used blue frosted gels and it worked quite well. I still white balanced it (rather than just use 5.6K preset) because it was overcast and I didn't want the picture to be too blue.

The blue frost and daylight were close enough.

Thanks again.

[xort]

Jerry
You don't mention if the windows are in the shot with extremely overexposed exteriors showing. If so, ND gell of N6 or N9 is needed. If not, can you put diffusion or something else over the windows to drop the intensity somewhat instead of heavy lighting to overcome the daylight, knock down the daylight to make lighting easier. I carry black visqueen, black plastic sheeting to cover up windows that are not what I want to light with.

[XCheck]

No the windows are not in the shots - that would have been entirely different game. They were fairly large for the small space, and I was mostly concerned with direct sunlight (of course, they face South). I guess the fact the day was overcast was big help.

One of those days I may post grabs from my shoot for your guys to critique it :o

[David Jimerson]

Hmmm... what about blasting it at a blue piece of posterboard? *I have no idea if that would work, but maybe it'd do the bounce and the (inaccurate) color-correction all-in-one?

Wow -- you'd have to barn door the hell out of that thing, wouldn't you?

[Barry_Green]

No, no amount of barn doors would help because the blue card would be the light source. You'd just have to use a black flag in connection with it to keep light from spilling.

But hey, it was just an idea, I haven't tried it... ;)