Black and white lighting tips
- Thread starter jordini99
- Start date
PerroneFord
Deals in Lead
I can offer three pieces of advice.
1. Start from zero. Black the set, then put lights ONLY where you need them. FIrst, raise the ambient enough to get a clean exposure at your chosen ISO. Then just add hard light sources where needed. Black and white photography is best when stark. Soften the light on your closeups and two shots, but on wides, think shafts and pools of light.
2. Make yourself a viewing glass with a couple pieces of red gel over a square of plastic or glass. The red gel will give a nice approximation of the scene in black and white.
3. For goodness sakes, protect your highlights. If you want attractive looking black and white protect the highlights, and keep as much detail in the shadows as you can. You can push things around nicely in post if you shoot it right.
The attached photo was not originally a B&W shot. I did this for our purposes here, but I light that shot with good tonality in mind. I did some maneuvering in post to get what I wanted, but you can see how we guaged ourselves around the available light as though they were lights we set.
This was a stillframe taken on the 5D movie by the way.
1. Start from zero. Black the set, then put lights ONLY where you need them. FIrst, raise the ambient enough to get a clean exposure at your chosen ISO. Then just add hard light sources where needed. Black and white photography is best when stark. Soften the light on your closeups and two shots, but on wides, think shafts and pools of light.
2. Make yourself a viewing glass with a couple pieces of red gel over a square of plastic or glass. The red gel will give a nice approximation of the scene in black and white.
3. For goodness sakes, protect your highlights. If you want attractive looking black and white protect the highlights, and keep as much detail in the shadows as you can. You can push things around nicely in post if you shoot it right.
The attached photo was not originally a B&W shot. I did this for our purposes here, but I light that shot with good tonality in mind. I did some maneuvering in post to get what I wanted, but you can see how we guaged ourselves around the available light as though they were lights we set.
This was a stillframe taken on the 5D movie by the way.
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PerroneFord
Deals in Lead
Right... overexposing is ok... clipping is NOT!