Lighting a night scene, confused.

C

crortega9

Member
First post! OK here goes: I've been reading over some threads on here about lighting and I've learned a lot but have become very confused at the same time. In particular with lighting a night scene. I'll reference Andrew Brinkhaus' thread for his short film as an example: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=115765

In his entry for 11-15-07, he describes the lighting for a night scene in which he is using lots of lights with lots of wattage, yet this is a night scene and it looks like it on the stills. Is this achieved through the use of china balls and diffusers ect? It just seems like a ton of light yet it doesn't look like it.

Another thing that confused me is he mentions using china balls and kinos, don't these two have different light temperatures? China balls being tungsten and kinos fluorescent? I read a lot of people saying not to mix the two.

I'm a beginner sorry for my lack of knowledge :-)

BTW I use a Canon HV30
 
Go outside at night, your eyes can see just fine and you can see great distances and most objects but cameras aren't so sophisticated and need you to help them out. Night scenes need a lot of light simply because you still need to be able to see everything. So, you have to bring up the overall light level to see your background. Now that you can see everything you need to bring in the Moon, a bright, direct, contrasty light. Night scenes need much more light than daylight scenes simply because it is dark outside and you need a lot of contrast to sell the illusion.

You can get daylight balanced bulbs for china balls and tungsten balanced bulbs for kinos, or you can just gel them. If you feel the need to mix color temperature lighting do it. The "rules" of lighting are not set in stone.
 
the camera needs a lot more light than your eyes do. But more than that, normally you want a good exposure. You might be able to take your camera out and shoot with only a small amount of light, but it will be noisy/grainy and you won't have a lot of control over what you see and have a lot of contrast. You want to have enough light so that the things in the shot that you WANT to be lit are well exposed.

In post, you can then make it darker to your liking and everything will be creamy and noise free. If you shoot underexposed, it will naturally be noisy and you'll be stuck with it.
 
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