Lighting under those long grocery store flourescents

S

snipe2k5

Member
Hi all, this is kind of a 2-part question.. I have a shoot inside a small grocery store and will be going for a clean soft colorful look. The shots will be medium-close at the check-out. I'm trying to ponder what the best way to light my talent would be. There are 2-bank flourescent tubes spread on the ceiling-which is fairly low- and therefore give strong ambient light. How should I supplement the light hitting the talent? I have a cheap 2-bank flouro 48in light, I could install the same bulbs from the grocery store and place nearer the subject for an even match? Or should I shut off the fluoro's directly overhead, and try the same? My other concern is the "greenness" .. How can I work to eliminate it? ....I could also build and use regular-base flo's to punch through diffusion or a softbox.


2nd part.. Another scene takes place in a restaurant, which has to be shot during the day (but takes place at night) and has daylight spilling through the windows, the whole restaurant is lit with incandescents however. I would really like to use tungsten lights to shape this scene so how do I do it? I could potentially flag, or shade the windows nearest our table, but I think some would HAVE to be unshaded, bringing in that ambient sunlight.. Theyre tinted windows, but I dont know how much it'll affect my picture.. Experimenting with 1/2 ctb and such crossed my mind, but alot of this is still new to me. Thanks
 
1) Your first scenario of using the same lights as in the ceiling to supplement to your key lights will match pretty well as long as the tubes don't flicker.
Just make sure they look ok on camera. If the store is providing these tubes they may be many years old and be a little unpredictable in their color reproduction.
If this is the case you can gel up some kino flos to match the exisiting florescents. Usually some 1/4 to 1/2 plus green will do the trick, you just have to determine where the color bias is based on your white balance preset (if shooting video).

2) If the restaurant scene takes place at night, no amount of daylight spill will look appropriate in your scene (if I'm understanding your question) If it has to look like a night scene just tape duvateen or visqueen over all the windows, then light to taste.
 
bill totolo said:
2) If the restaurant scene takes place at night, no amount of daylight spill will look appropriate in your scene (if I'm understanding your question) If it has to look like a night scene just tape duvateen or visqueen over all the windows, then light to taste.
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I agree that there shouldn't be any daylight spilling into the scene, however some daylight gelled down to tungsten behind the camera can help to bring up the ambient levels a bit. Also produces no heat as opposed to bouncing a blonde into some bead board. I would probably avoid this since daylight can be unpredictable, but I've done it before and it is a possibility.

OR, you could go day for night and ND the windows (a lot).
 
Thanks.. Right, so I'll stick with using my banks with the "poisoned" flourescent tubes, and simply try to get the best neutral exposure since I always set blacks and coloring in post.

for the restaurant, the windows are only on one wall of the whole place so maybe I can black them out - Is there anything cheaper than duvatyne that's good at this? As the windows are rather large and I can't afford to gel them, and dont have alot of duvy.
 
snipe2k5 said:
Thanks.. Right, so I'll stick with using my banks with the "poisoned" flourescent tubes, and simply try to get the best neutral exposure since I always set blacks and coloring in post.

for the restaurant, the windows are only on one wall of the whole place so maybe I can black them out - Is there anything cheaper than duvatyne that's good at this? As the windows are rather large and I can't afford to gel them, and dont have alot of duvy.
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Lots of cinefoil?
 
Black plastic rubbish sacks taped to the glass? Anything to get rid of the outside light - or at least dim it down!
 
It seems that you may need to consider a general approach to lighting a practical set

I suppose I evaluate the light and have some options

-turn it off
-blast it
-roll with it
-modify it

Turn it off - thats obvious apart from the sun which is hard to turn off
and now some offices have auto lighting too..

Blast it
Add so much light that the practicals are very dim - this is great if you have the welly - most likely not

Roll with it
Light to the colour of the practicals - for example a ballroom may be huge and have a load of tungsten - here you would have add tungsten

Modify it - by adding ND or filtration to the practical lights or changing out the bulbs I carry a few daylight bulbs for desk lamps and the like.

So your locations

First we dont now how tight your shots are - with a CU usually all optons are open - lets say you cannot keep super tight

The first location, ideally you would modify it by swapping all the tubes out and add some kino, but I guess for budget you are best to put a green filter on your kino key light and roll with the existing ambeint colour temperature by balancing your camera for green

The second location, you need to turn it off, the sun - I guess the place doesnt have blinds (!) then its a night shoot or a world of bin bags

I guess they dont want to lose evening trade, then do it a 0200 hours..

Once you have dark (plus I guess the tungsten practicals) then Id put a 1/2 orange on daylight lighting (or a 1/2 blue on your tungsten lighting) balance off that and the practical tungstens will retain warmth without going over orange..

I guess the resturaunt could look a load better if you actually see some dark outside the windows, maybe passing car lights etc..

IMO

S
 
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The color temp. of commercial flos can vary widely from tube to tube. Something you may want to keep in mind.
 
You could probably use black felt from a fabric store to cover the windows if you find that to be any cheaper -- just make sure you have some way to hold it there securely without damaging the property.

If the windows aren't in the shot, you might be able to move it inside to possibly get some minor benefit to sound capture.
 
Thanks for all the tips! Great advice and the shoot was successful. For the restaurant scene we ended up using the whole roll of 24'' x 25ft roll of cinefoil we bought (and didn't intend to use on the windows). Maybe next time I'll just get anything black.. somebody mentioned trash bags.

The sunlight was intense, but adding a few strips of blackwrap in key areas helped bring the daylight down to an OK level. We decided on making it a daytime scene, but that didn't hinder the fact that the indirect sunlight was there and bad. For those who are interested, Here is a screenshot since it's not commercial work, for anyone who wants to see. This is my first time lighting and shooting a scene - I have never worked on a production until today.. Just read books and took photos. It's jolly good fun!
 
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