Need help on lighting

K

Kenneth Lau

Active member
Hey guys, I need your expertise!!

I will be shooting in a parking lot for a music video and I HATE the yellow light in this parking lot.

I will not be able to kill these light and I will not be able to flag them off with anything because I will have a lot of low angle wide shots.

I was just wondering, if it is possible to change the colour temperature of the camera to make it look white?

Will this affect the rest of my lighting and the skin tone of my cast?

I will be shooting with the RED ONE by the way.
 

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Sodium lighting is a very diffficult one because they don't have a continuous colour spectrum - just a nasty huge spike in the orange - so the usual white balance process works very badly. The usual solution is to add extra light that you can balance too, but the nasty orange is still going to be there. If the intention is to get faces the right colour, then you're going to need to get them off and replace them with proper light sources - or cover them in black wrap. You won't be able to cover them with gel as you'd do with continuous sources - as there's no light output at the blue end - so unlike flus, that you can correct - discharge sources like these are a big problem,
 
Someone suggested in a thread recently (can't remember who or where... sorry!) about blocking off just the light on the talent and lighting them with separate lights, while letting the rest of the light go orange and act as strong rim/backlights (and the shots he posted looked great). That's what I'd recommend here... even for wide shots, I'm not sure I see much reason you couldn't black out one or two of the overheads and light separately.
 
Sure you could white balance to these lights or even gel them for effect, but are you going to be using any other lights for this shoot?
 
that looks good. I'm sure you saw Dig, the Sony F55 test. There is a scene outside at night. The ambient light looks like sodium vapor but her skin tone is perfect right at 4:03. Here's a screen grab jpg... the video looks way better. When I saw this, I wondered how the heck they got that to look so good. Maybe, as you did, they filled with daylight, blocked the sodium there and just let the sodium vapor light fill the background. This looks ridiculously good to me. This is all pro graded stuff as we know

DigStillNightExt.jpg
 
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sonofaresiii said:
Someone suggested in a thread recently (can't remember who or where... sorry!) about blocking off just the light on the talent and lighting them with separate lights, while letting the rest of the light go orange and act as strong rim/backlights (and the shots he posted looked great). That's what I'd recommend here... even for wide shots, I'm not sure I see much reason you couldn't black out one or two of the overheads and light separately.
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I loved to black out ALL of the lights so that i wont have any orange. Just that I am worried when it comes to a wide shot, I will see the black wrap in the shot.
 
My advise against Kinos would only be to consider how well you can light your subject in wide shots with them :happy:

Hscully, that frame grab is mint.
 
i would go with paulears suggestion and individually black wrap the car park lights and put in your own lighting.

in australia most of the streetlights have their own light sensors to switch them off when it gets to daylight.
these are pointed at the ground and if you aim a dedo on full spot at them presto.....the light switches off.
 
Parking lot shots

Parking lot shots

Btw, these are the sample of the shots I will be doing.

As you see the bottom shot, you can see a lot of the ceiling in the background. If I black wrap the orange light, will I see the black wrap in frame?

Thats what I am worried the most cuz I do have quite a few low angle shots.
 

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Those lights are far enough off that if you black wrap them correctly (with no light leak), you'll be fine. Heck, do that and toss up a few non sodium tungstens to maintain realism.
 
Why don't you just figure out how to turn them off? No need to black wrap and you can see them in your shot.
 
Kenneth Lau said:
Ryan, I have tried that already. They won't let us turn it off for safety reason.......
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Then I would suggest not worrying about seeing the black wrapped lights in the long shots, or getting in there with the camera and shooting a complete test of the lighting you are going to do and get with your colorist and see what you can make of it.

You may also want to think about doing some research on the emotional power of color and getting a good spiel together about how orange is the color of ... what ever emotional theme it is that the music video is supposed to express. Just sayin'
 
You seem to be a bit hesitant about covering them in blackwrap, so maybe there is another route you can take. Think about what you can do production design wise to cover the lights. Are there things in the parking garage that protrude down already? Create more of those and stick them over the lights. I don't know what the exact answer is, but just think about what the art dept. can do to solve your problems.

Or finally, just go with it. White balance to the sodium vapor the best you can and gel your lamps to match.
 
White balance, if you have a camera that lets you manually adjust it can give different results - some good and some bad, but auto white balance on a sodium (or neon or mercury) source produces very odd (or great, depending on what you need) results. Gel just doesn't work because if you use a blue gel, which removes red, then as there is virtually no blue from a sodium source, all the gel does is go black - you get hardly any light output at all. In things like car parks and streets lit with sodium, then as long as you don't mind the orange look, you do get very monochromatic results - because the light source has only one colour! It can look great! It won't ever look natural and have normal colour rendition.

I guess that if you want a car park to look realistic, then perhaps the mono look is correct. If you light it in 'proper' lighting, would it look more like a set?

I did smile at starcentral's car park image - nothing to do with colour, just the singer, singing into a side-fire mic as if it was a hand held. Only audio people would spot this one, and it's quite common!
 
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