Snapper123
11-28-2010, 07:18 AM
Hey guys, one scenario that I think is very common is trying to use window sunlight as a light source, and even if you're not trying to use it as your primary source, any footage shot inside a room with windows will have the sunlight coming into play somewhere or other. The thing is, aesthetically, you don't want your windows to be perfectly exposed; the scenery outside them will look camcorder-ish and will not look normal for film aesthetics. Along with this, if you expose the camera to the window's light, the window will be exposed as though you are standing outside and most likely, your entire room will be extremely dark on camera when it truly isn't in real life - camera's just don't have our eyes, you have to truly pick and choose what is the most important exposure for your scene.
But this can be tough. Like I said, you don't want to make your windows look perfect and not overexposed in the least because this will make your room too dark and will make the windows look too camcorder-ish and not every aesthetically pretty. But then, you don't want to expose your room as though there is no bright window source, because if your camera happens to pan or see the window, the window will appear so extremely overexposed that it will blare everything else out in the shot and it'll also look awful. So what do you do? I'm personally wondering how you find the direct middle between the overexposed source, and the underexposed source. Common sense tells me that you want to find this direct middle so that everything looks slightly bad, instead of one thing looking perfect and one thing looking horrible. This "both sources are bad" middle point is useful because that is the point where the windows are slightly overexposed as they should be for traditional film aesthetics, yet now you can use artificial light sources to brighten up your room only minimally, if needed at all - if you want to see perfect details outside your windows, for example, you'll probably spend all day just trying to light the inside of the room, and that's just not adviseable.
So how do you find this point?
Also, I thing to consider is that the time of day helps. If you shoot at a time where the day is cloudy or the light coming into the windows is less severe, that means you may be able to brighten up the exposure in your darker room and it'll give you more freedom without reaching a point in your windows where the windows are too overexposed. Less light from your windows means less light in a room, so I'm guessing it would be more relative and wouldn't change much, but there's a chance it may give you a bit more freedom.
But again, how do you find the perfect point for say, the window being 25% overexposed and your unlit room being 25% underexposed? Or 50% overexposed/underexposed? White cards don't seem to be a great tool because you generally have to put them in front of one light source or the other, and the object here is to first find the middle point. On the camera, the last metering mode in viewfinder mode seems to actually do this method that I'm talking about, but you can only use this mode in the viewfinder and you can't use it quickly for shooting video or shooting photographs on the LCD. I'm not sure if external light meters do this and to be honest, they are also a tad expensive. So what would you do here?
But this can be tough. Like I said, you don't want to make your windows look perfect and not overexposed in the least because this will make your room too dark and will make the windows look too camcorder-ish and not every aesthetically pretty. But then, you don't want to expose your room as though there is no bright window source, because if your camera happens to pan or see the window, the window will appear so extremely overexposed that it will blare everything else out in the shot and it'll also look awful. So what do you do? I'm personally wondering how you find the direct middle between the overexposed source, and the underexposed source. Common sense tells me that you want to find this direct middle so that everything looks slightly bad, instead of one thing looking perfect and one thing looking horrible. This "both sources are bad" middle point is useful because that is the point where the windows are slightly overexposed as they should be for traditional film aesthetics, yet now you can use artificial light sources to brighten up your room only minimally, if needed at all - if you want to see perfect details outside your windows, for example, you'll probably spend all day just trying to light the inside of the room, and that's just not adviseable.
So how do you find this point?
Also, I thing to consider is that the time of day helps. If you shoot at a time where the day is cloudy or the light coming into the windows is less severe, that means you may be able to brighten up the exposure in your darker room and it'll give you more freedom without reaching a point in your windows where the windows are too overexposed. Less light from your windows means less light in a room, so I'm guessing it would be more relative and wouldn't change much, but there's a chance it may give you a bit more freedom.
But again, how do you find the perfect point for say, the window being 25% overexposed and your unlit room being 25% underexposed? Or 50% overexposed/underexposed? White cards don't seem to be a great tool because you generally have to put them in front of one light source or the other, and the object here is to first find the middle point. On the camera, the last metering mode in viewfinder mode seems to actually do this method that I'm talking about, but you can only use this mode in the viewfinder and you can't use it quickly for shooting video or shooting photographs on the LCD. I'm not sure if external light meters do this and to be honest, they are also a tad expensive. So what would you do here?