Lighting for black and white interviews

[mc2600]

Hi,

I will be doing a number of black and white interviews in my home, and am looking for some advice about the right lights to get. The interviews will all be of a single subject, and are being made for web distribution ... so perfection isn't necessary.

I know just enough about lighting to know I don't know what I'm doing, hence this post. I bought the Vortex interview DVD, which is great. (If you have recommendations for other material to learn from, I'm up for that, too.)

Here are two samples that I'd like to get feedback about how to duplicate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzX9j...eature=related

^^^ I really like how clean and simple that interview looks.

The second is much more dramatic. I have no idea if I'd like the end result over an interview, but I'd at least like to play with it ... so I need to know what to buy to experiment. Specifically, I'm intrigued by the lighting on the guy in the 4th picture in the post below:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=112623

Thanks in advance for any feedback or help. I appreciate it.

Michael

[PaPa]

for the youtube video, you need a single soft source, above, directly infront at a 45 degree angle. and it looks like there might be a slight backlight.

for the dvx user image, you need at least 2 lights. Two strong light sources seem to be coming from the back/side of him giving him a nice outline with light leak on the face. So perhaps on the side of him, and then another 15 degrees back.

Then a soft fill for the face and shadows.

[FBAS]

for the youtube video, you need a single soft source, above, directly infront at a 45 degree angle. and it looks like there might be a slight backlight.

I think you can see there is a backlight at the beginning, after the make-up is done when he moves his head to the left of the frame, but it's hardly noticeable in the actual interview because it seems to be at a 0° angle right behind him and it's not very strong. To achieve the total darkness in the background you need a black cloth as a background with enough distance so it won't get hit by the key light. Favorably use an eggcrate on the soft source to prevent spill on the background. I think the key might be lower than 45°, there's hardly any shadow below his chin - you need even more distance to the background for that.
They probably also crushed the blacks pretty much (which might be another reason why you can't see the backlight at all)

[PerroneFord]

I was thinking the same thing on the first one. The glint in his eye is nearly DEAD center which suggests the key is not all that high relative to the face, but frontal. The shadow under his jawbones on both sides also suggests this.

This is an interesting exercise considering I just read the quote that you can learn more about lighting from observing the shadows than the lights. Of course, my old still photography comes back to me, and I am always looking for light(s) the eyes. How many, and at what angles.